It takes Rotheram a slow moment. It’s the weekend after V-E Day; he’s seen the pictures of celebrating crowds in the paper. Though he can’t quite share the abandon of those open, shining faces, he’s stared at them, fascinated. He’s not been back to London for more than six months, has tried to persuade himself that he doesn’t miss it, but now the thought of being there grips him.
“That’s settled, then,” Redgrave tells him. “Hand him over at London Cage by this evening and they’ll debrief you there.”
Hawkins, Rotheram thinks. And for all the anger he’s felt towards his former CO, he just nods. It feels fated somehow to see him again.
Rotheram finds Baker in the billiards room, peeling safety tape off the windows, hauling it down in long ribbons, which he leaves dangling like so much bunting, when Rotheram asks if he’s ready to go.
Hess is silent for the first few miles, cradling his sides. “Stomach cramps,” he explains. But when they reach the main road, he leans over to Rotheram.
“I thought of you,” he says. “When I saw those new films. You know the ones I mean?”
Rotheram nods. Hess is referring to the newsreels of the liberation of Belsen. Rotheram, as part of the denazification effort, has spent the last fortnight overseeing their screening at several POW camps. Eventually, all the prisoners will be made to watch them.
“I wanted to ask you,” Hess said softly, “if they were true.”
Rotheram is silent at first, almost chagrined that Hess’s question is no different from that of the humblest German private.
“You think they’re propaganda,” he says.
“I hope so.” Hess smiles ruefully. “At least ours was beautiful.”
“Why ask me?” Rotheram wonders, but Hess just looks at him, as if the answer is obvious, and after a moment Rotheram says simply, “Yes.”
“You wouldn’t lie to me?”
“Don’t you know?” Rotheram asks a little roughly. “You, of all people?”
Hess draws back. “I know nothing about all that,” he says hurriedly. “I had nothing to do with it.”
“Surely you don’t remember what you had to do with or not.”
“I remember some things.”
“But not this? So how can you say for sure you weren’t a party to it?”
“That,” Hess says quietly, “I think I’d recall.” He blinks. “To have done such things and not remember them…”
“You believe me, then? That they’re true?” Rotheram asks, and Hess turns away, stares out of the side window at the scenery gliding past. Rotheram feels sure he’s going to deny it, and then Hess nods, almost imperceptibly, and Rotheram shudders, oddly disappointed, as if he’d been the one asking Hess if the films were true, praying they weren’t.
Most of the POWs he’s shown the films to vehemently refuse to believe them. They claim they were made in Hollywood. One actually swore that he recognised Henry Fonda playing an officer. Even those who acknowledge the footage is real claim the voice-over is a lie, that the dead aren’t Jews but cholera victims in India, or German POWs in Belgium, where the camps are reputed to be disease ridden. He’d seen men weep at that last thought. Despicable as their denials are, they seem almost desperately innocent to Rotheram, and he’s come to doubt the War Office’s policy of showing the newsreels to the men, obliging them to watch them.
They’re never told what’s coming; just another newsreel, another feature, they think. Rotheram stands at the back of the mess hall as the lights go down and the projector begins to whirr. There’s the usual murmur of conversation at first—once the Pathe News cockerel has been greeted with clucking—and then a slow stifling of the noise. The first thing to get the men’s attention are the fences, the barbed wire, and the low barrack huts. For a second, Rotheram is convinced, the men must wonder if they’re about to see themselves up there onscreen, larger than life.
It’s his job, thankfully, to watch them, the prisoners, rather than the film. He stares at the way their cigarette smoke swims up through the rays of the projector like watery ghosts, or how the reflected light silvers their shoulders, yet still he finds his eye drawn back to the screen, catching fragments of footage. A hut being, burned to the ground with a flamethrower. The blank, masked faces of onlookers, local people, soldiers. An arm slipping off the side of a cart, swinging there lazily, almost gaily, like a hand trailed in water. A wave of corpses breaking before a tractor blade.
Afterwards, when the reel runs out, the film fluttering in the gate like a caught thing, the screen goes white, bathing them in its searing light as if for a flash photograph. Rotheram snaps the projector off and in the darkness there’s silence. None of the men know what to do, how to react. It’s as if they’re waiting, waiting for the reel to be changed, waiting for the film, the main feature, wondering what could follow that, what could make them forget. But of course, the show’s over.
Rotheram knows of only one prisoner who’s accepted the films completely—a fellow who claimed to have seen his own mother among the local German women brought to Belsen to bear witness—and he’d been beaten black and blue by the others.
Rotheram knows the films are true, yet they’re being used as propaganda. At heart, he’s simply not sure how or even if men can be forced to believe such things.
He can hardly bear to believe them himself.
He recalls becoming furious with his own mother once when she made him read a report about concentration camps in the newspaper. This would have been in 1937, less than a year after they’d arrived in Britain. She had him read aloud to her to improve his rusty English, but he hated it when she corrected his accent. He kept at it only because it was better than being goaded by the local children, calling him Adolf whenever he opened his mouth. She insisted he learn the language as a boy—“it’s your mother tongue, after all”—but he always chafed at it. For once she’d fallen silent as he read, and he thought he must be doing well, until he looked at her and saw she was crying. “Such terrible things,” she told him when she had recovered herself, and he looked at the paper in his hands in surprise. He’d been concentrating so hard on his pronunciation, he could barely recall a word of what he’d read. He set it down, shook his head when she asked him to go on.
“Not if it’s going to torture you. Besides,” he said, “it may not even be true.”
He meant it to comfort her, but she looked at him fiercely, and he’d become defensive. She insisted they speak English to each other, but it frustrated him, made him strident. Even now, after they’d escaped, he felt their old fight about fleeing Germany still smouldering between them. He had tried to tell himself he’d done it for her, but in his heart he knew she’d made them leave for his sake. You want me to be afraid, he’d told her once, and she’d said, I’m your mother. I’m afraid for you.
“Weren’t you the one,” he said, “who told me about the British during the last war, their propaganda about German soldiers eating babies, raping nuns. They said that about men like my father.” He folded the paper. “So how can you know that these things are true?”
“Even if they’re half true, they’re terrible enough,” she admonished him. “I hope they’re not true, but I fear they are.”
“Fear,” he sneered. “Fear will make you believe anything.” Yet sometimes, he thought bleakly, he wanted the stories to be true, desperately, cravenly desired them to be the very worst things, the most terrible atrocities, however unbelievable, if only because it would mean he had run for a reason.
He looks across at Hess now, huddled in the corner of the car.
“But how can you believe me?” Rotheram explodes. “How can you believe…that? Those pictures. How can you just take my word for it?” He stares at him aghast, as though if the films are true, Hess can’t exist; if Hess exists, a man sitting in a car having a conversation, the films can’t be true.
And without turning, as if thinking aloud, Hess tells him.
“You have to remember how successful we were, ho
w much we’d achieved. Seizing power, reclaiming the Rhineland. Austria! We would look at each other and shake our heads in wonder. How could such things happen? You might think we were driven mad by power, but we—I don’t speak for him, but the rest of us—we were the opposite of arrogant, we were humbled by these successes, we couldn’t believe we’d achieved such things. Perhaps it was luck, but once you have enough luck, it starts to feel like fate. Like tossing a coin, having it come down heads again and again. Once or twice is nothing, but five times, ten? It’s shocking. But how can you stop? So we set our sights higher. Poland, Holland, France. What next? What could top what had come before? The Soviet Union! We knew it was impossible, but everything else before it had been impossible.” He shook his head. “And if you ask me, this…this thing was another impossibility. What if we eradicate a whole people? What if there were a world without Jews?”
“That’s enough!” It’s the most Hess has ever recalled, but all Rotheram wants is for him to shut up. Some questions, it occurs to him, should never be asked, let alone answered. But Hess seems not to hear him.
“It’s a hypothesis, you see, but the problem with a hypothesis is you don’t know it’s true until you test it. You can’t believe a thing is possible until you do it. Yet until you do it, why even ask if you should? There’s no morality about the impossible, Captain. To us, you must understand, this was like climbing Everest, like going to the moon. We couldn’t believe such a thing was possible, and that’s how we could do it.”
Hess looks over, almost beseeching, but Rotheram leans back against the upholstery, as if exhausted. It’s madness, he knows now, and it comes to him forcefully how truly vain this mission has been from the start. Hess is mad, but not just now, not temporarily, not simply since his flight to Britain. He’s always been mad, all of them have been, all the monsters and butchers. Lucidly mad, rationally mad, functionally mad. Under any other circumstances he’d say Hess was unfit for trial, and yet it’s his very madness that demands to be tried.
“Maybe that was the mistake,” Hess is saying, as if to himself. “Killing the Jews after our conquests. If we’d just got rid of them, driven them out of Germany, not invaded Poland, the rest, would the world have cared? Britain, America? About some Jews?” He shakes his head. “Yet those victories, that glory, the binding loyalty of war, perhaps they were all essential to carry the people with us.”
“Enough!” Rotheram cries, lunging across the broad back seat, and having the satisfaction of seeing Hess jerk back, his head bouncing off the window. “So help me! Say another word and I’ll wring your neck myself.”
It takes them almost an hour from the outskirts of the city to the Cage, Baker working his way laboriously through streets blocked by joyous crowds spilling from pubs and cafes. Hess leans back in the staff car and hides his face, but the few times anyone pays them any attention, it’s to offer a cheer or applause.
At the London Cage, they part in silence. Hess is led away to another car, never looking back, and Rdtheram is told to report to Hawkins.
“Sorry about that,” Rotheram tells Baker as he goes.
“Not at all, sir. Always fancied stringing him up with piano wire meself.”
Rotheram finds himself sitting across the familiar desk. Hawkins offers him a cigarette and a tumbler of Scotch while Rotheram tells him, a little stiffly and before he is asked, that Hess had nothing new to offer.
“Didn’t really expect it,” Hawkins admits.
“Where are you taking him?”
“The Tower.”
Rotheram nods.
“How’ve you been?” Hawkins asks. “Missed you around here, you know. Could have used you, preparing for all this.” He gestures around the room, and for the first time Rotheram sees the boxes piled against the walls.
“You’re moving?”
“Lock, stock and barrel. Nuremberg, they reckon. Though they haven’t found decent digs for us yet, far as I know. Not that there’s much to be had over there right now.”
Nuremberg, Rotheram thinks. Of course.
“Look,” Hawkins says, leaning forward. “It was rotten the way things went for you. I tried, but you know how it is with orders. Still, I should have tried harder. Anyhow, the truth is I’d like you to come with us. You should be there. I mean, Lord, I saw those films. Sickening.” He reddens before Rotheram’s eyes. “What I mean to say is, you deserve to be there, if you ask me, and I’ll move heaven and earth to make it happen.”
The desk suddenly seems very wide, a vast veneered plain.
Rotheram reaches for the edge of it, puts his palms on it to push himself up.
“It’s not necessary,” he says. He sees a flash of hatred in Hawkins’s eyes, but doesn’t regret it. Better, he thinks, that you should hate me than feel forgiven.
Outside, he presses his way through the choked evening streets, hurrying at first, then slowing as he becomes caught up in the throng of bodies. Before a pub in the Tottenham Court Road, he pauses to watch a man in a trilby, staggering with drink, falling to one knee and being helped up by two others, who clap him on the back as if he’s just run a marathon. Behind him a crowd pours out of one of the theatres in Leicester Square and sweeps him along towards Covent Garden. Someone starts to sing, and soon they’re all at it—‘Lambeth Walk’, ‘We’ll Meet Again’, ‘Pack Up Your Troubles’, ‘Bless ‘Em All’.
Rotheram would break away, but he’s hemmed in on all sides. He tries to join in, but he feels self-conscious. And then his arm is hooked, and he looks around to see a red-faced girl beaming at him. “Can’t sing for toffee myself.” And no sooner has he leaned in to catch what she’s saying than she’s spinning him in a jig or a reel, and soon the whole crowd is twirling. “What do they call you?” she shouts, and he tells her, “Joseph.” She points to her chest and yells, “Lucy! Pleased to meet you, Joe.” Her bare arm is warm in the crook of his elbow, and Rotheram finds himself entranced by it, this point of contact about which they spin, and then he bounces off someone else’s shoulder and catches her heel and she stumbles, sprawls. Seeing her open her wide mouth, he almost bolts, and then she starts to laugh, a raucous peal. “Your face!” she cries. “I’m not made of china, you know!” She holds up a hand and after a second he grasps it and hoists her back on to her feet. She gives him a sloppy theatrical kiss and swings off from arm to arm through the whirling crowd.
He works his way to the edge of the group, pulls up in a doorway, watches them go, marching now to ‘Lili Marlene’. It’s too late for Rotheram to join in, but the lilt of the tune stays with him as he heads north through Russell Square, Islington, along streets of celebration and streets of rubble. Finally, sometime towards nine, he finds a little hotel. Out there in the night, he knows, couples are coming together and making victory babies. Nine months from now they’ll be repopulating the Continent. As for Rotheram, he’s been awake for two days straight, and he falls swiftly into a deep and dreamless sleep, drifting off to the bursts of laughter and snatches of song from the street below, his last thought that tomorrow he should visit his mother’s grave.
It’s the last time he’ll see Hess in person, though two months later, in a darkened cinema, he’ll see him in a newsreel, sitting in the dock at Nuremberg. Hess will look shabbier, like a prisoner at last, and haunted, his deep-set eyes sunken, cowled in shadow. He’s expected to plead insanity. His lawyer has already made the case. Hess will be asked by the French judge to confirm his plea. He will rise and blink in the bright lights of the newsreel cameras and grip the rail before him. He’ll waver for a second, then stiffen, straightening his back. The amnesia he has claimed all these years, he will announce to the hushed court, was simulated, for tactical reasons. He renounces it. He will sit back down in the long, long dock, which looks so disconcertingly like a jury box, and Goring will lean into him, smiling, and pat him on the shoulder.
The prosecutors won’t challenge the claim—it’s a gift for them, justifying their decision to try him. And after all, Ro
theram will think, watching the camera pan across the row of stark faces, how is one to know one’s mad amid the ranks of the insane? But then something about Hess will strike him. He’s the only one of the accused not to don the simultaneous-translation headsets that International Business Machines has invented and donated to the proceedings. Rotheram will have read this in the papers. The headphones pinch his head, Hess has told the court, utterly unimpressed by the incredible technology, simply pointing out the poor fit. So he sits there oblivious, dipping into a copy of Grimm’s Fairy Tales, which he rests on his knees, smiling and occasionally nodding in response to what, no one knows. And it will dawn on Rotheram that this is just another suicide attempt. These men will hang, and Hess, by asserting his sanity, is volunteering to hang with them.
He’s getting away! Rotheram will want to shout at the screen. Can’t you see?
And yet, for all this, Hess will not swing for his crimes. He’ll be convicted on counts 1 and 2 of the indictment, Crimes Against Peace, Planning Wars of Aggression in Violation of Treaties, but not on counts 3 and 4, War Crimes and Crimes Against Humanity—the timing of his flight, before the full implementation of the Final Solution, sparing him. He’ll be sentenced to life, instead of death. He’ll grow old in Spandau jail. He’ll be a prisoner for the rest of his days. He’ll never escape. He’ll never be freed. There will be pleas for his parole, but the Russians will block them every time, perhaps out of vindictiveness, a lingering suspicion, or perhaps—it is rumoured—because even in the frozen depths of the Cold War, the meetings between the old Allies go on at Spandau. Ostensibly to discuss Hess, they will provide a thin but unbreakable thread of diplomacy so that the human relic of one conflict will, in a stony irony, help in a modest way to avoid another. Hess will lose his hair. Hess will lose his teeth. Hess will lose his mind, again or for the first time, to senility. He will live to hear that man has conquered Everest, walked on the moon; that Germany has hosted another Olympics; that the American actor turned president, who likes to say he was in the war though he was only ever in movies of it, has visited Belsen on the fortieth anniversary of its liberation and even claimed (to the Israeli prime minister, no less) that he filmed the hewsreels of its liberation. And Hess will shake his head in disbelief at it all. He will be ninety-three at the end. And then he will die, finally succeeding after all these years in taking his own life, hanging himself, his limp body as light and lifeless as the faded flying suit he wore to Scotland, which he will have kept hanging on a hook on his cell wall, like a shed skin, ever since.
2007 - The Welsh Girl Page 31
