The film jerks through a splodge of film cement to an outdoor scene as the group of officers in SS tunics, flared trousers and caps bearing the SS–Totenkopf, walk beneath trees swimming in manicured lawns. They stop beside a brick building crammed with elongated rectangular metal windows, like rows of predatory teeth, and gesticulate at a sign: Walther–Werke. Max Pauly leads the group as they stride into the building; Ernst Adermann follows immediately behind Alfred Trzebinski. Inside labourers wearing ragged striped uniforms work at various machine stations tooling the components of rifles and pistols. Their heads, close–shaven and often bearing scabs and blemishes, bow down to avoid eye contact as the party of high profile officers files by inquisitively.
Ernst Adermann stops beside one labourer and points to the part he is making. The startled labourer stares back through wide eyes and holds out the angular piece of metal. Adermann grabs the man’s hand roughly and turns it over to reveal missing index and middle fingers. A slight commotion ensues as a foreman appears and remonstrates with the worker, cuffing him across the face. Adermann saunters away indifferently to rejoin the group, slapping his black gloves across his left forearm absently. Behind him the worker is led away from his work station, prodded in the back by a Wehrmacht soldier’s rifle.
A pulse of bitter vomit surged to the back of Otto’s throat. He managed to swallow it. What had his father just done – with such callous dispassion? Otto could not reconcile in his mind that the action he had just witnessed was perpetrated by his own loving father.
A further smudge of film cement is the prelude to the next scene outside yet another nondescript brick building, this time signposted Carl Jastram Motorenfabrik – U–Boot. The entourage of uniformed officers makes their photo call beside this sign and then dutifully moves into the building behind Max Pauly. Labourers in pyjamas, thin and gaunt, unshaven and dirty, work without a flicker of emotion at lathes, presses and drills. The officers, many of whom walk with their hands clasped behind their backs, nod to each other in approbation at what they see.
A labourer, emaciated and sweaty, slumps forward at his work station, his arm narrowly missing the spinning drill bit. Nearby workers watch in terror, their hands maintaining a perpetual activity, afraid even to slow down. Alfred Trzebinski approaches the labourer, his hands still clasped firmly behind his back, rocking on the heels of his jackboots. He bends over stiffly at the waist, casting a sneering look over the ailing worker as one might inspect a stricken farm animal. He makes eye contact with the attending Wehrmacht soldier and shakes his head, making a quick gesture with his index finger beneath his chin. Instantly the incapacitated labourer is dragged away from his post without a flicker of protest.
Otto swallowed and glanced at the reel of film. How much more was there? This was far worse than he could ever have imagined, and he felt as though he was committing a crime merely by watching the incriminating images.
The next splice heralds a clinically utilitarian room furnished with glass cabinets and an examination couch. Alfred Trzebinski is wearing a white laboratory coat over his SS tunic. Beside him stands a tall, gaunt man with very closely cropped hair that more keenly resembles that seen on prison labourers. The prominent tag on his white coat reads Obersturmbannführer Ludwig–Werner Haase. Haase is addressing Trzebinski and two others, one of whom is Ernst Adermann, whilst holding in his hand a conical glass flagon etched with the letters ARSEN and containing a colourless liquid. He removes the glass stopper and inserts a pipette into the flagon, siphoning out a measured quantity which he checks by holding the pipette up to the light of the window. Trzebinski and Adermann watch Haase intently as he adds the ARSEN to a jug of water, using the pipette to stir the mixture a few times.
Replacing the stopper in the flagon he moves to a blackboard and begins to write numbers and formulae on the board. Adermann and Trzebinski nod, huddled behind Haase as they watch his every move. Then Haase walks across the room and produces a canister which he places into the neck of another jug, returning briefly to jab his finger at the blackboard once more. He turns to study the faces of the men gathered around him, says something, and then Ernst Adermann pours the liquid in the jug containing ARSEN through the canister into the second jug.
The next scene shows a row of prisoners wearing pyjamas, some with matching linen caps on their shaven heads. All men are painfully thin with sunken cheeks and eyes, sitting in resigned acceptance with their hands in their laps. A metal cup is passed from prisoner to prisoner and refilled each time from the jug. Adermann, Trzebinski and Haase watch with smug satisfaction as all the men consume the ARSEN. Haase turns to the others and shrugs his shoulders, upon which a Wehrmacht soldier shepherds all the inmates away and locks them in a small room.
Otto could feel the perspiration building up beneath his armpits and on his upper lip. He felt dirty, voyeuristic, watching something seedy and criminal, implicating and tarnishing the memories of his father and his family, and by inference even him. He thought of Max and Karl at home in Durham, blissfully unaware of their grandfather’s nefarious actions, and was immediately deeply ashamed.
He had seen images similar to this before when he and Dieter had watched Father’s personal films several nights earlier. In this footage, however, Father’s presence was unequivocal, his collusion beyond dispute. He was not the cameraman, he was the perpetrator amongst ignominious company. How did Father manage to keep this from all of them and take his sinister past with him to his grave?
The camera pans across the grubby yet cherubic faces of twenty young children seated around a table tearing chunks off round sourdough loaves. They wear roughly woven linen shirts and shorts, most of them barefooted. Many smile, though reservedly, chewing their food hungrily. The man with slicked–back hair and a beakish nose walks around the table, like a headmaster with his hands clasped behind his back. Some of the children, no older than six, watch him warily.
The scene abruptly changes to reveal a young boy with black hair parted down one side lying on an examination couch, his right arm exposed to a nurse who preps his skin with a wet swab. He suddenly turns away and shuts his eyes tightly, creasing up his entire face around a button nose as a fearsome glass syringe is produced and plunged into his arm, its contents injected. Relief floods back into the boy’s face as he realises it is over, only to evaporate again as his shirt is unceremoniously hitched up under his chin to reveal his ribs. Prepping his chest with the wet swab causes him to withdraw as a look of sheer horror paralyses his face. He begins to writhe but several strong hands descend to restrain him. This time the beak–nosed man, identifiable by his badge as Hauptsturmführer Kurt Heissmayer, steps forward with a syringe and inserts the needle between the boy’s ribs near his nipple before deftly discharging the contents.
The boy’s face erupts, his mouth open wide in a silent howl that exposes his uvula and tonsils at the back of his mouth. The film cuts to another boy being injected in similar fashion, once again by Heissmayer. On this occasion Ernst Adermann is visible in the frame, holding the boy down by his arms as his chest is violated.
Otto’s eyes stung from dryness as he stared in abhorrence at the images that flickered on the screen, unable to blink. His father, holding down young boys to enable them to be cruelly assaulted in the name of medical science, the same father who raised him as a boy and tousled his hair lovingly. It was unbearable to contemplate the mechanisms behind what he was seeing. How could this be the same man he had known as Father?
Heissmayer stands in front of a chart headed with the word Tuberkulose as he addresses a small audience of SS tunic–clad officers in a wood–panelled room. Smiling, he taps on photographs of young children displayed on an easel; frightened young faces staring back innocently at the seated audience. Heissmayer draws his hand up the opposite arm and across his chest towards his armpit, lifting his arm to allow him to prod this space as he speaks.
A bubbly cement join yields to the body of a young boy with torso laid bare, lying on a linen�
�covered table with a Schimmelbusch mask held on his face by an anaesthetist. The boy’s arm is splayed at ninety degrees to his chest exposing his hollow armpit, which a nurse in a surgical gown is prepping with a dripping swab, leaving a smudge on the skin. A gowned surgeon hidden behind a face mask steps forward and incises the skin, probing its darkening interior with gloved fingers and steel forceps as blood pulses out from within, staining the white linen drapes. He extracts numerous lumps of tissue that resemble tonsils. These he drops into clear liquid in a glass jar before suturing the skin back together.
The next scene shows a line of twenty children, naked to their waists, standing against a white wall with one arm raised above and resting on their heads. The camera pans slowly down the line from one to the next, showing clearly the jagged scar in each child’s right armpit. The children stare back impassively, some younger ones grinning stupidly. At the end of the line the camera lens fills with the images of Heissmayer, Adermann and another man, all wearing white coats and standing with their arms folded across their chests. They smile proudly and puff on stubby cigars.
A grubby splodge of cement precedes a dark scene, heavily scratched. Shadows dominate with occasional dimly lit brick arches visible in contrast. A row of clothes hooks are mounted along one wall, a row of steel lockers down another. A bad splice, more lines smearing the image, then twenty small bodies dangling lifelessly from the hooks, like discarded football shirts, stiff fingers barely protruding from the sleeves, little feet pointing to the ground, the shadows concealing most of the ghastly naked truth.
The screen went white, the front reel had stopped turning but the take–up reel, heavy with film, rotated futilely, rhythmically slapping a trailing edge of film against the table with every completed revolution. Otto just made it to the bathroom and retched into the toilet bowl. His eyes watered, his lungs ached to scream out in useless protest at the terrible images he had witnessed.
But he knew it was too late for protest. It was done. His fate and that of his family had been sealed in those moments of madness over forty years previously.
Why, Father? Why? Another surge of vomit silenced Otto’s attempt at a scream.
Thirty–Three
Otto was staring into the hole beside the fallen camelthorn when Dieter emerged through the kitchen door, hands pushed into his chino pockets, whistling a Spandau Ballet tune.
“What are you doing out here?” Dieter asked, continuing to whistle.
Otto did not move a muscle; arms folded tightly, glassy eyes peering into another world. “Where the hell have you been?”
Dieter recoiled visibly and stopped whistling. “At the library… working.”
Otto unfolded his arms and tapped his wristwatch. “For three hours?”
“What are you, head boy?”
“Fuck off!” Otto said.
Dieter opened the palms of both hands in a gesture of surrender. “Jeez, what’s eating you?”
“Christ, Dieter. We’re supposed to be here for Mum’s funeral, sorting her stuff. You’re never around.”
Dieter frowned and approached Otto slowly. “What’s going on?”
Otto’s chest heaved, though his eyes remained fixed on the crumbling recesses of the makeshift grave. “I found some films.” Otto paused, looking up.
“What films?”
“Let’s walk,” Otto said, turning away.
They ambled in silence down Bülow Street, into Bismarck Street and onwards to town, heading for Robert Harbour. The sun was melting into the horizon, casting casual tangents of pink and orange across the unblemished blue. Hugging the coastline, like scum at the edge of a pond, a fine mist of sea–spray softened the frontier where ocean met desert.
“What’s going on?” Dieter said, stroking his bushy moustache.
Otto looked up into the burnt orange sky. “I came here to bury Mum, to be reunited with you and Ingrid, to… I don’t know… remember old times.” The thud of their footfall broke the interlude. “I didn’t expect to find out about Inez – the sister kept secret from us, to discover that it was a young child buried in our garden, to contemplate that it might be connected to us, to find out that Inez committed suicide over bad blood with Dad about her Jewish boyfriend, to find out that Dad had his ashes scattered on the site of a former concentration camp here in Lüderitz—”
“Yeah, the ashes thing is very disconcerting, isn’t it?” Dieter interjected, meeting Otto’s eyes.
“Especially when you know why,” Otto replied coldly.
They crossed Hafen Street and walked across the silent docks beside abandoned and locked warehouses. Fishing trawlers rolled gently on the harbour swell, straining their sturdy rope moorings with ghostly creaking noises; forklift trucks stood silent, their operators relaxing in the taverns of Lüderitz.
“Do you know why?” Dieter said, raising his eyebrows.
Otto nodded solemnly. “I found several films coiled up and hidden in a box in Ingrid’s bedroom.”
“Hidden?”
“That’s what it looked like.”
“And?”
“I spliced them together.”
“You’ve watched them?” Dieter said. Otto wasn’t sure if it was curiosity or censure he heard in his brother’s voice.
Otto nodded as they passed the warehouses and began to pick their way across the rocky terrain. The wind buffeted their faces and flicked their hair about with abandon on the exposed peninsula. They stopped and Otto surveyed the open, poniard–shaped land that constituted Shark Island with disdain. He tightened his jaw muscles.
“Well?” Dieter prompted.
“Dad was a Nazi.”
“What?”
“He was a Hauptsturmführer – I saw him in his SS uniform, mingling with other SS people.”
“What’s a Hauptsturmführer?”
“It’s a military rank.”
“Jesus!” Dieter exclaimed.
“They did medical experiments on prisoners… on children… Christ, it’s awful to watch.” Otto thought he might sob, clutching at his face with one hand.
Dieter stared at him open–mouthed. “Are you sure it’s him?”
“I think I’d recognise my own father,” Otto said tersely. He turned away from Dieter, his eyes flitting from one sharp rock to another across the inhospitable terrain, a former site of mass murder at the hands of the German colonialists just eighty years back. “What kind of sick monster wants to be laid to rest on a site like this, where innocent people were murdered in their thousands?” Otto said.
He sat down abruptly, paralysed by a yawning ache that was hollowing him out in the middle. He couldn’t breathe. Dieter sat down beside him and rested his arms on his knees. Their eyes met.
“The kind of person who does not want to be buried next to his daughter,” Dieter said, “or even in the same cemetery.”
Otto stared into Dieter’s eyes. He could see the personal anguish masked behind Dieter’s brazen exterior and regretted his earlier outbursts.
“All because she had a Jewish boyfriend?” Otto said, his intonation rising towards the end.
A dismissive expression crossed Dieter’s face momentarily. “Possibly.”
Otto lowered his gaze to the coarse soil between his feet. “They killed young children, Dieter, Dad and his SS cronies. I saw it.”
The colour drained from Dieter’s face. “It’s in the film?”
Otto nodded and hung his head in shame between his knees, aware of a slimy exudate that dripped from his nose to the sandy soil in slavery strings. Trying to think of something good, he pictured Sabine, Max and Karl, but then immediately felt guilt over Max’s broken arm, and then shame at the thought of them discovering their grandfather’s true identity.
“You thinking about the body in the garden?” Dieter asked.
Sniffing loudly, Otto looked up. “How can one not?”
Dieter stared at him, deadpan. “Surely not?” He shook his head as if banishing any such thought.
�
��I’ll tell you what I keep wondering: how much of all this did Mum know?” Otto said.
Dieter held up the flattened palm of one hand, as if directing traffic. “Stop, Otto, don’t do this to yourself.” He shook his head, swallowing. “We’ve just buried Mum for God’s sake.”
Both brothers breathed heavily, their stunned eyes looking around the island, as if searching for the ghost of Ernst Adermann who had returned to haunt them.
“I’ve got to see this film,” Dieter said, staring out to sea.
“We must call Ingrid too,” Otto said.
Dieter nodded. “I suppose. Should we tell Frans?”
Otto stared at his brother, his eyes taking in every detail on his face: the moustache that he used to associate with Tom Selleck but which now made him think more of the Village People; the misshapen nose that he had inherited from Dad; the chipped tooth from the steps down to Bülow Street; the scar on his chin. Until that moment Otto had not considered Frans in the context of Father’s Nazi bombshell. “I don’t know.”
“Let me see the film first. We can decide who we tell afterwards.”
“Ingrid needs to see it too before we—” Otto began.
“Well she has to get her uptight arse back here then, double quick,” Dieter replied. “When is Frans expecting the DNA results?”
“The next day or two,” Otto said. He felt his throat drying out. “Christ, a week ago I would never have believed that body had anything to do with our family.”
“You think it has?”
“I don’t know what to think. But I keep saying to myself: why was Ingrid in such a hurry to leave town?”
Thirty–Four
Otto never got to call Ingrid at her hotel in Windhoek on their return. Upon opening the front door to escape the deepening gloom of nightfall he heard the phone ringing and dashed to reach it. It was Sabine.
“When are you coming home, Otto?” she asked plaintively.
Otto felt a lump rising in his throat. He wished she was in front of him – he needed to feel the warmth and reassurance of her embrace, to rest his weary chin on her shoulder and smell her hair. He was in desperate need of some constancy. Almost everything he had regarded as immutable in his childhood was disintegrating around his feet. It was like standing on quicksand.
16mm of Innocence Page 21
