Touching the Wire

by Rebecca Bryn

  Had Grandpa or Miriam stood here, on this very spot? She stirred the grey dust with a foot and a small whirlwind carried it away. Adam stared along the tracks as if seeing the frightened huddle of the dispossessed. He removed the paper clip from the sheets of paper and one fluttered to the ground, took off again and cavorted on the wind. She dashed after it, desperate to save Miriam’s words. It evaded her grasp and flapped across the ground like a wounded bird. She trapped it with her foot and plucked it from the ground.

  Her footprint on the paper accused her: Miriam, and millions like her, suffered under the cruel stamp of a Nazi jackboot. Listen… listen… see what they do… ‘I’m sorry, Miriam.’

  Adam’s hand on her shoulder startled her. ‘My fault. I should have made sure I had a good grip on them all.’

  She handed him the sheet of paper wordlessly.

  He squeezed her shoulder and then carefully dusted the paper before he continued reading. ‘All our belongings, our personal possessions, even our clothes are taken from us. We are shaved of all body hair and made to shower. We stand naked for hours. They give us filthy rags to wear, and shoes that don’t fit, but no underclothes. Numbers are tattooed onto our forearms.’

  ‘They treated them like cattle.’

  ‘Worse than cattle. They’d have fed cattle. Listen.’

  Listen…

  ‘We have had nothing to eat or drink for four days. We do not yet know that everyone we love has been gassed. They tell us the chimneys are bake houses. Bake houses must mean there is food. We ask for water and are told there is none.’

  ‘She lost her baby… almost her whole family.’ She couldn’t imagine never seeing Mum, or Gran, or Lucy and the children again, to be alone. She didn’t know how to tell him about her baby.

  Adam’s breath was warm on her neck. ‘Later, we are given a ration of hard grey bread with a square of margarine. Bowls of thin liquid are passed round. They call it soup but I see no vegetables or meat in it. It smells of rotten cabbage or turnip. Mother and I each take two mouthfuls before our bowls are snatched by the next person. There are complaints that the Blockälteste and her favoured friends have scooped their share from the bottom of the vat leaving us only liquid.’

  ‘How can people treat other people this way?’ She moved away from Adam, the death-scape blurring.

  ‘It’s called survival.’ He swept a hand at the scene before them. ‘Are you sure you want to see this?’

  ‘Grandpa couldn’t leave, could he? Miriam and her family couldn’t leave.’ She followed a well-trodden path towards low wooden buildings. Bunks were jammed in wherever they would fit, dozens of them, three high, with room for three people to sleep side by side. Numbers could be seen on the ends of the bunks; initials and names were carved in wood worn smooth by countless hands. On roof beams were painted orders in German.

  Adam translated as they trod in the footsteps of the dead. ‘Hats off in the block. Cleanliness is health.’

  Her fingers traced the carved initials. The walls were covered with line drawings, names and dates: a desperate people, reduced to numbers and clinging to their humanity. Jammed in like that disease would be rife, and disease wouldn’t be tolerated.

  He reached for her hand. ‘Do you want me to go on?’

  ‘No, but we have to read it.’

  ‘Night comes at last and we are grateful to lie down. Bunks, three tiers high run down both sides of a long wooden building with high windows. There are rows and rows of such buildings as far as the eye can see. We are ten to a bunk…’

  ‘Ten… ’

  ‘We are ten to a bunk, lying so close, head to toe, that if one moves all must move. We have no mattress and only one blanket to a bunk, and must sleep with our clothes and shoes for fear of theft. Feet stick in my face, and elbows in my stomach. I am so exhausted that I sleep anyway. In the morning we are given only black coffee. Some of the women have saved bread for breakfast. The sight of it makes our stomachs cramp. One woman had hers stolen as she slept. We are glad we ate ours.’

  He turned a page. ‘We trip over one another in our rush for Zählappell, and then spend hours more standing outside the hut while we wait to be counted.’ They left the cramped claustrophobia of the barrack and breathed fresh air. ‘A pall of smoke hangs over the camp and the smell is sickening. We know it can’t be bread baking. Ilse has been here a month. She comes from a village not far from my own, and is wise in the ways of the camp. She tells me to stand next to her, and Mother stands next to me. We are to be friends. She has traded her bread ration for a shoe that fits and is trying to trade for another. Shoes that fit are more important than bread. If we cannot work because of raw feet we are uneconomical to feed and will be picked at the next selection.’ Adam’s voice sounded hoarse.

  ‘Here, let me.’ She took the sheets of paper from him. The breeze fluttered at their edges as if trying to cleanse the pages of horror. Was this where Miriam and her mother stood, waiting to be counted? ‘We are marched to the latrines in groups of fifty at set times. One latrine to serve many thousands, rows of holes where we must sit together and only two faucets where we wash together, everywhere filthy with mud and excrement. Most of us have diarrhoea. Mother cannot wait and soils herself. She is mortified and in tears but no-one takes notice. She is not the only one. Behind the latrines is where we meet to trade goods. The guards appear not to see. It is how the camp functions. Shoes for bread, bread for needles, buttons for shoes. Any of us would trade a diamond ring for a piece of bread. They say our jewellery is sent back to Germany. I wonder who will wear my wedding ring. I have a bad cold. I trade my bread ration for a piece of cotton to wipe my nose.’

  ‘You don’t think of the small things that make life tolerable.’

  ‘We take such a lot for granted, Adam.’ She scanned the next entry before reading it. ‘Lice torment us. Lice carry typhus. They disinfect us, making us stand naked for hours while they bake our clothes and gas the barracks, but the lice are back within days. I find buttons in the soup. I try not to think of how they got there. I will trade some for needles. It is raining. The mud makes every movement difficult. We are to keep the barracks clean yet we have no water except for rainwater we collect in leaky bowls. We must appear clean ourselves or risk looking unwell. We wash at the faucets, holding our clothes between our legs to stop them being stolen, and use our dresses to dry ourselves. Some are so thirsty they drink the washing water even though they know it makes them ill. The soup is as rancid as the soap, and I think they try to poison us. We drink it anyway.’

  Adam pointed. ‘There’s another mention of Chuck. I antagonised one of the guards by not having the right expression on my face. He kicked me to the ground. I vomited, and for that I am made to kneel in the rain for a day and a night without food. I am watched all night from a guard tower. I dare not move. Later, when I am ill from exhaustion and exposure, and taken to the infirmary, a doctor tends me with care. He asks me to help him, as he has heard I am a nurse. It is Chuck, who saved my life on arrival at the camp. The rations are better and infirmary nurses are not selected for the gas chambers. God is good. Chuck and I work with pitiful supplies. He shows me the photographs of my family, which he saved from Grandmother’s case. I thought I had no tears left. He keeps them safe for me and trust in each other grows. Chuck asks me to write in his diary. I feel blessed.’ Adam stopped, eyebrows raised. ‘Blessed? She must have been a remarkable woman.’

  ‘Let me see that.’ She read the entry herself. ‘These photographs… they must be the ones Grandpa put in the carving. My God, listen to this. Today Chuck smothered Darja’s newborn baby. I don’t understand and am angry. He says mothers who give birth are thrown live into the ovens with their babies. He has buried the child. No-one but me knows it ever lived. God deliver us from this hell. New prisoners arrive and we stare at them as they stare at us. They look almost fat to us. Are we now the penned and emaciated animals?’

  The next entry was sparse. Adam sounded drained. ‘Darja
touched the wire.’

  Tears ran down her cheeks. Darja had died of a broken heart: the loss of her child, possibly her last link to the man she’d loved, had pushed her beyond despair. Grandpa’s long silences and distant stares had been filled with pain and helpless guilt at this inhumanity, and he had told no-one, forced to hide vital evidence of these atrocities to protect Gran from Nazi sympathisers. She read through her tears. ‘I went with Mother to the showers. We were beaten all the way. Someone stole Mother’s shoes. I will try to find a pair that fit her. Someone will die tonight and they won’t need them anymore.’

  Adam put his arms around her and kissed her hair. She leaned into him, loved, comforted, her stomach churning at the thought of losing him as Grandpa had lost Miriam. ‘I am beyond tired. Hunger fills my mind. Every night I dream about soup and bread. We saw Father again today. He seemed to know us but I worry about his will to endure. His arms and legs are like thin sticks and are covered in sores that won’t heal. He is a chemist, and Buna is to produce synthetic rubber, yet he is made to carry cement on his back twelve hours a day. Mother says if he dies she will touch the wire like Darja.’

  ‘Oh God. The guards opened fire on men and women calling to one another across the road that separates the camps. Mother and Father are dead. Everyone she loved.’

  They walked for a while in silence. Adam’s hand held hers and she gripped it as if it were a lifebuoy in a raging sea. He’d been right when he’d said she shouldn’t come here alone. Numbness threatened to steal the horror. Grandpa and Miriam couldn’t shut it out and fly home. How had they endured? They’d had each other. Their love, so intense in such conditions, had kept them strong, courageous, alive.

  Adam stopped beneath a watch-tower behind which high wire fences stretched in both directions as far as the eye could see. He took the pages from her. ‘I am afraid. Mengele ordered Chuck to work in the Main Medical Block. He didn’t want to go but Mengele knows Chuck cares for us. He goes to protect us but I miss him. Ilse and I continue his work. The hours are very long. The days are longer.’

  ‘They were so brave.’

  ‘They lived in constant terror but, other than touching the wire, they had no option. There’s a bit here… Chuck came today. He told me something of the plight of the children Mengele keeps. I will not have him hold my life above theirs. He looked awful. He wept as he wrote in the diary. He wouldn’t tell me what he wrote.’

  She took the diary from her handbag and turned to the place that had made her retch. ‘Here. He… Mengele bleeds children to see how little blood they can survive on. He injects them with lethal germs, and transfuses blood between children with different blood groups. He removes organs and performs castrations without anaesthetic. When one twin dies as a result of his torture he kills the other and compares bodies. And in the midst of this horror he makes meticulous notes. Today he dissected a baby, alive. He is insane for surely no-one is this evil. I vomit at what I see and I can do nothing to prevent it without risking retribution upon others. Death would be a release, but I must survive to bear witness.’ She closed the diary and reached for Adams hand. ‘If Miriam had read this she would have touched the wire herself. She would never have asked that of him.’

  Miriam took her hand and whispered through her mind. You must see… You must tell the world… we were people like you. We loved and lived, but they stole our dreams, our families, our lives. They walked again in silence towards a ruin of collapsed reinforced concrete and bricks. Miriam led her on. Come… come. They stopped in front of a sign.

  Crematorium II

  This hundred-metre long pit was called the Changing Room. A thousand or more people at a time were suffocated with ZyklonB, industrial pesticide. Above, serviced by elevators, stood a building where the bodies were robbed of their jewellery and gold teeth, and then shorn of all their hair before being burned in the furnaces.

  ‘Dear God, they ran it like an industry… this is where the gold…’ She’d run her fingers through that gold. The ring: could it possibly have been Miriam’s, or was it another’s token of love wrenched from a dead hand?

  Adam took up the narration. ‘It was estimated…’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘Economically packed, the furnaces could reduce around five thousand people a day to bone and ash, and they worked twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. That’s like murdering, what… a hundred coach-loads, day in, day out?’

  ‘And Auschwitz wasn’t the only camp.’ She stooped to pick something from the grey soil between the wildflowers that endured amid the desolation. ‘It’s bone.’ She paused, shocked, in the act of casting the fragment away. The land all around was grey. It was ash; tons and tons of humanity fed the very plants that flowered around them. Auschwitz wasn’t a memorial or a museum… it was a mass grave.

  ***

  Charlotte walked into the museum curator’s office in front of Adam. They were expected and were greeted soberly, but with an air of suppressed excitement. ‘Dr Bancroft, Mrs Bancroft. I am Andrzej Wiśniewski. This is a great day for the people of Poland, a great day for justice.’

  Mrs Bancroft… the curator didn’t need to know they weren’t married, and might never be. Adam being his usual optimistic self… or making sure she kept her anonymity intact? She should have told him about the baby but anything could happen in the first trimester. And she was making excuses. She let him do the talking.

  ‘Yes, it is a great day, Mr Wiśniewski. I’m honoured to be able to make these copies available to you. I shall personally return the originals to Auschwitz when our experts have examined them.’

  Mr Wiśniewski nodded. ‘Thank you, as you say, they belong in Oswiecim One. They’ll be pivotal to the new exhibition. The press…’

  ‘Press?’ She gulped down panic.

  Adam appeared unconcerned.

  ‘I respected your wishes to be allowed to visit the museum in peace. The press won’t be informed of the documents’ arrival until after you’ve left.’

  ‘Thank you. My wife and I appreciate that. It’s been a very moving experience. I’ve prepared a statement for you to read to them.’ Adam undid his rucksack, took out the file of documents and passed it to her. She held it while he casually re-fastened the straps.

  Mr Wiśniewski’s hands reached forward expectantly. It was hers to give, her oath to keep. She held it out silently.

  Mr Wiśniewski turned a few pages. ‘I can’t believe this. Mengele, Muench, Schmitt… Written, signed proof after all these years. How did you come by the documents?’

  Adam answered quickly. ‘They were an anonymous donation but their authenticity is not in doubt.’

  The curator turned more pages. ‘Someone risked a lot to save these. I should have liked to have thanked them.’

  She moved away and stared through the window across the Birkenau camp complex. Thanks? She had fulfilled her oath.

  ARBEIT MACHT FREI

  The words hung over the main entrance to Auschwitz I. Charlotte looked up at Adam. ‘What does it mean?’

  He pulled a wry face. ‘Work makes you free.’

  Rows of long, well-built brick buildings crowded neat streets, in military order. Adam put the translation back in its envelope: Miriam couldn’t help them here.

  They followed the signs to the photographic exhibition. She searched the faces of prisoners, trying to recognise Grandpa or Miriam. Naked skeletal bodies… tattooed forearms, branded like cattle. Heaps of emaciated bodies. Women, leaving the camp for their march west, wearing clothes and shoes unsuitable for a Polish winter. Children, every bone distressingly visible. ‘Adam, look… There’s a picture of Mengele and this is Schmitt.’

  Mengele was a commanding figure: tall and slim, his dark hair smoothed back, his uniform immaculate. His dark eyes pierced her. Beside Mengele, Schmitt was disappointingly ordinary: a small, neat young man with close-cropped fair hair and pale, cheerless eyes.

  ‘They don’t look evil, do they? I don’t understand what can make a
man do such terrible things. The power that Hitler must have wielded…’

  ‘The Jews weren’t popular. Maybe he was just a spark fanned by the wind of resentment.’

  ‘But wholesale slaughter… how could they live with what they did?’

  Adam shook his head. ‘They say Mengele never showed any remorse for his actions. You’ve seen enough, Charlotte.’

  Chapter Thirty

  They arrived back at Sunnybank exhausted. Charlotte trudged up the stairs and dropped her handbag onto the bed. Adam followed lugging his rucksack.

  She wouldn’t sleep after what she’d witnessed today. She wanted to hold him and never let go. She should stop being a coward and tell him the truth, but she hadn’t the emotional strength left. She hadn’t even the strength to finish reading the translation and she wasn’t sure she ever would have.

  Adam held her close as tears wet her cheeks. ‘Let it out, sweetheart. It’s been a harrowing day.’ He held her for a long while and then kissed her. ‘Better, now?’

  She nodded. She didn’t deserve his love. She concentrated on practicalities. ‘You have an early start in the morning. Would you like a drink before we turn in?’

  ‘I’ll make it. You look shattered.’

  She followed him down the stairs. Dobbin stood in the corner, waiting for her child to bring him back to life. Adam had glued on his ear and mended the broken leg. Life scars, he called them. She knew how Dobbin felt.

  She ran her hand along his back, stirring memories of galloping through imaginary fields and mythical forests. For a moment she was five, in Grandpa’s workshop with the smell of wood dust, paint and polish. She missed him; he’d always made everything right. Adam stood in the kitchen doorway, watching her. He’d been quiet all the way home. Had he guessed her secret? Who keeps silence… ‘What’s bothering you, Adam?’