Touching the Wire

by Rebecca Bryn

  Robin’s sardonic smile made him squirm. Adam’s questioning voice spiralled him back to the person he’d been, and the love he was about to destroy forever. ‘I was torn between two nations, Lucy. Mother was English… she met Father in 1911 and moved to Dresden. War broke out… her family disowned her for marrying a German, so after Father’s death at The Somme she stayed in Germany… she had friends there. Her brother was killed fighting for the Allies at Passchendaele… 1917… and the family rift widened.’

  Charlotte frowned. ‘How could you fight against your mother’s country?’

  ‘Choose my father’s side over my mother’s? They rejected her. She and my sister died when the allies bombed Dresden. My grandmother lost both her children.’

  ‘But you were loyal to Hitler,’ Adam pressed.

  ‘I was sucked into his mad schemes. When Hitler and Eichmann unveiled the Endlösung der Judenfrage, the final solution, I was sent to Auchwitz and ran one of the camp infirmaries.’

  ‘Under Mengele.’

  ‘That was when I realised the inhumanity of Hitler’s vision. I did what I could to help my patients. Then I fell in love with Miriam.’ His left fist failed to clench. Will-power alone kept panic from his voice; he must try to explain. ‘I tried to keep her safe. I was assured she would be safe if I was a good Nazi.’

  Adam nodded. ‘And you were a good Nazi?’

  ‘You were also a doctor.’ Charlotte spoke the words like an accusation.

  ‘I met Josef at the University of Frankfurt in ’38. We were research assistants at the Institute for Heredity, Biology and Racial Purity. I hoped to find cures for hereditary diseases, not what Hitler dreamed of, what Mengele did… never that. At Auschwitz, he forced me to assist him in his evil experiments. It seemed to amuse him. What was I to do, Charlotte? Lucy?’ Barbed-wire enclosed him, imprisoning him in a hell of his own making, a hell he longed to escape.

  He reached out to touch the wire: instead, his hand touched Lucy’s. His was thin and bony, an evil claw against her soft innocence but she didn’t pull away. Charlotte’s expression… he’d destroyed her memories. ‘Miriam lost her whole family in the camp.’ Her gaunt face and skeletal body haunted him; she’d existed knowing every day could be her last. He rocked backwards and forwards, the band across his heart more than grief. The daughters of Night grew impatient.

  Lucy closed her fingers around his hand. ‘What happened to her, Grandpa?’

  He closed his eyes and the room receded, the voices around him faded, the temperature dropped to -25c and his body shook, weak with fear, exhaustion and cold…

  ‘Is she alive, Chuck?’

  He lifted Miriam’s featherweight in his arms. ‘Albert, bring as many blankets as you can find and see if there’s anything that will burn.’ He carried her outside into the clean air and held her while Albert piled stiff blankets onto the snow. He laid her down and wrapped more blankets around her. ‘Miriam… Miriam, it’s Chuck. Can you hear me?’ He chafed her frozen hands with his. ‘Hold on, please hold on.’

  Albert returned with splintered boards, ripped from one of the barrack doors, and straw from a mattress. He cleared an area of snow. ‘Let’s get this fire going.’

  While Albert struggled with the fire he heaped clean snow into a metal bowl. A spark caught and splinters of wood, teased free with Albert’s knife, smoked thinly. Small flames guttered in the breeze and Albert fed them with more wood.

  He placed the metal bowl in the flames. Slowly, the snow gave up a mouthful of warm water. He gripped the bowl with a wad of blanket and let it cool on the ground. ‘Miriam…’ He lifted her, and held the bowl to her lips before the water chilled. ‘Miriam, drink this. Albert, we need more fuel. See if there are any others still alive… and bowls. We’ll need more bowls… dehydration, hypothermia.’ Albert hurried away and he urged Miriam to drink. Water dribbled down her chin. ‘Swallow, Miriam, please. Good… more…’

  Albert dropped splintered planks by his side: somehow he’d found the strength to rip them free. He fed wood on the fire and then went to collect clean snow.

  Miriam swallowed another mouthful.

  ‘There are women still alive in there.’ Albert handed him bowls and warmed his hands by the flames.

  While the snow melted in the bowls, he and Albert helped the women to the warmth of the fire, wrapped in blankets taken from the frozen dead.

  Albert coughed a harsh, rasping cough. ‘There must be something to eat in this God-forsaken hole. I’ll see what I can find.’

  He nodded and mixed sulfa with water, willing it to dissolve. ‘Miriam… the sulfa will make you better. Drink.’ She opened her eyes. Her wrists and fingers were skeletal, her hollow cheeks made her face triangular, the thin skin parchment taut across her cheek bones; her eyes were sunken, her tongue swollen, her lips a mass of sores… there was hardly anything left of her. He kissed her forehead, and she smiled.

  Her lips moved: she made no sound but he knew the shape of the word. Szeretlek. I love you.

  ‘I love you too, Miriam. Szeretlek... szeretlek.’ She was too weak to grip the bowl, so he held it while she drank again. She moistened cracked lips with her tongue.

  ‘Diary...’

  ‘Don’t try to speak. Drink some more, please.’

  ‘Diary.’

  ‘Is it in its hiding place?’

  She shook her head.

  ‘It was found?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You moved it?’

  She nodded.

  ‘Do you have it on you, now?’

  She lifted a hand enough to point.

  ‘It’s in the infirmary…’ No response. ‘The surgery…’ Her expression didn’t change. ‘In the nurses’ room? In your bunk?’

  She nodded and sank back exhausted.

  ‘I’ll find it. Now, drink, please.’ He could tell by her eyes that she thought he’d come too late. ‘Albert will find something to make into soup. We’ll cook it on the fire and drink it, looking at the hills.’ He glanced at the hills she loved: the freedom for which she’d longed. Her pulse was weak, erratic. He had to keep her conscious. ‘You like the hills, Miriam. When you’re stronger we’ll head north with Albert. Mother said England was the most beautiful country in the world. We’ll make a home there with roses… remember the roses… We’ll raise a family.’

  Her eyes opened. ‘Arturas… Peti?’

  She’d forgotten. ‘We’ll take them with us. They’ll have brothers. We’ll call them Jani and Benedek and Aaron. If we have girls we’ll call them Czigany… and Efah, and Ilse, and we’ll tell them stories about their grandparents and great-grandparents.’

  Her eyes were closed now, her breathing ragged and slow.

  ‘Miriam… Miriam?’

  Her breathing stopped with a sigh and her mouth went slack.

  ‘Miriam…. No…. No-o-o-o.’

  He rocked her in his arms, his tears soaking her hair. He closed his eyes to shut out the huddled, starved figures around the fire, and the desolation of the camp. Flames danced before his eyelids; the heat of the fire burned his face, while the wind chilled his back as cold as death.

  ‘Chuck?’

  He looked up wordlessly.

  Albert held out a squashed tin of meat. ‘I found it on the road. Must have been run over by a truck. And outside the gates there’s a clamp of potatoes. I filled my pockets. I’ll take something to carry more. We have food, Chuck, food.’

  ‘She’s dead, Albert. Miriam’s dead.’

  Albert squatted beside him and stared into the flames. After a long moment he sighed. ‘She died in your arms, Chuck, knowing you came back for her. No-one here could ask for more.’

  He held her, his face buried in her hair, while Albert fed the fire and made thin broth in a metal wash-bowl to feed the survivors. The ground was too hard to bury her and he couldn’t bear for her to lie with the half-rotted cadavers heaped by the infirmary wall. He borrowed Albert’s knife and gently cut a curl from her hair, then slipped h
er wedding ring from her finger: looters would not have it. He lifted her into his arms and walked towards the birch woods beyond the wire. He laid her among the trees, free at last, for the wolves and woodland creatures to take back to nature, as the earth reclaimed the ashes of her family. Her bones would be her testimony now.

  The birch woods faded into the past and the faces before him came back into bleary focus. ‘She smiled for me… I laid Ilse by her side, as she’d been in life. Miriam looked like an old woman… She was only twenty.’

  Lucy wiped away tears. ‘Grandpa, I’m so sorry.’

  ‘Miriam would have touched the wire rather than have the children suffer because of what I did, Lucy. I let her down. I did terrible things. I was too much a coward to do what was right. Miriam was the one with courage.’

  ‘Wselfwulf…’

  ‘You remember, Charlotte?’

  ‘Yes, the Wolf of Slaughter… it wasn’t just a story, was it?’

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  The Wolf of Slaughter… Walt clenched arthritic fingers. ‘What happened in Medical Block Ten, and Block 32 in the Sauna… nothing prepared me for that.’ Again the past swallowed the present as he testified to the horror, the faces before him fading.

  Mengele greeted him cordially, his white coat immaculate, his spectacles enlarging predatory eyes. He waved the cane he habitually carried. ‘Come, my friend. Observe my methods.’

  He nodded, swallowing hard. ‘Herr Doktor.’ Mengele had expanded on his earlier words, words that had forced his feet here against his will. If you displease me the entire block will go to the gas, but not before each one has been raped and had the skin stripped from every part of their body. Have you ever seen a woman without skin… a living woman? Fascinating.

  The entire block of women raped and stripped of their skin. He would do it, of that he had absolutely no doubt; the bastard would enjoy hearing them scream. There would be no lack of volunteers to do his bidding; human skin had a market in Germany, according to rumours from Buchenwald, for lampshades and handbags.

  Mengele motioned him into a room. ‘I find human genetics absorbing.’ He motioned to a girl of about sixteen, sitting naked beside a boy of the same age. ‘Take these two… not identical twins, naturally, but twins nonetheless… They are newly arrived and in good health. The girl menstruated two weeks ago.’

  He nodded. Long-term inmates ceased to menstruate.

  ‘You understand how rare is it to have the opportunity to study the effects of in-breeding in a controlled environment. The girl has a physical abnormality, as you can see. The boy almost certainly carries the same gene.’

  ‘You can’t mean…’

  ‘Girl, come here.’ He motioned impatiently and the girl approached, trying to cover her nakedness with her arms, one of which was abnormally thin, withered almost. ‘Put her on the table. Fasten her wrists in the loops.’

  He hesitated. ‘There are other ways.’ The image of raped, skinned women reflected in Mengele’s eyes. He helped the girl onto the table: refusing wouldn’t save her. Wide eyes stared into his as he fixed the loops around her wrists and pulled them tight.

  ‘Boy… Come closer.’ Mengele held one of her legs. ‘Hold her other leg, Hans.’

  He felt bile rising and swallowed it. He felt her shame. He held her leg beneath the knee, exposing the soft, secret place.

  Mengele had the boy by one arm: the youngster’s face flushed as he tried to back away. ‘You have had a woman?’

  The boy shook his head.

  ‘You will fuck your sister.’

  ‘No… it is wrong. I cannot.’

  ‘You want her to die?’ Mengele’s voice grew angry, his grip tightened. ‘You will fuck her every day until she is with child. That way she will live. There is no other way to save her, or yourself. If you fail in this I shall cut off your balls and make you eat them. Then I shall throw you both into the brothel to be fucked to death by the guards and the kapos. Some of them have nasty perversions.’

  ‘Marika?’

  The girl closed her eyes. ‘Do it, Enri.’

  The boy looked at his limp penis, tearfully. Mengele took hold of the flaccid organ and brought the boy to a state of arousal. ‘Now, boy, prove you are a man.’

  The engorged organ shrank visibly.

  Could he save the youngsters some part of their shame? ‘Wouldn’t artificial insemination be more reliable, Herr Doktor?’

  ‘Not necessarily, and it wouldn’t give such satisfaction. Here, we witness the beginning of life in its primal state… we are making life as we want it.’

  ‘It’s perversion.’

  ‘Scientific interest. Experiments like these will help us to select the genetic material we need to create the master race.’ He looked at the boy in disappointment and then lashed the prone girl across the stomach with his cane, making her scream. ‘Enri, your sister will be beaten if you fail. Now, bring yourself erect again or I shall have your sister do it with her mouth.’

  Enri flushed and began masturbating. He dashed away tears with the back of a dirty hand. ‘Forgive me, Marika.’ He climbed onto the table and lowered himself between his sister’s open legs.

  She turned her face to the wall as he entered her and thrust. He came almost immediately and withdrew, weeping.

  Mengele nodded with satisfaction. Blood mingled with sperm on her thighs. ‘Both virgins. Excellent… couldn’t be better. Release her, Hans.’

  He released the wrist straps. The girl and her brother would live, while they were of interest to Mengele.

  ‘Such opportunities must be seized, my friend.’ The doctor’s face animated as he steered him from the room, leaving the boy and girl sobbing in each other’s arms. He resumed the teacher role. ‘Now, identical twins... How often can one experiment with ready-made controls to compare results?’

  ‘They are human beings, children, not laboratory specimens.’

  He waved aside his concern. ‘They’re sub-human. Jews, gypsies, dwarves.’

  A tall, uniformed figure in the next doorway pushed forward a small boy whose striped shirt sported a black triangle. ‘As you ordered, Herr Docktor. Number 458. Lithuanian Zigeuner. About six years old. Identical twin.’

  No… not Arturas. Beads of sweat stood out on the child’s forehead. Dark eyes flicked from him to the taller man. If he showed concern, Mengele would make sure the boy suffered.

  ‘Ah, the gypsy twin. You have the records?’

  The officer nodded. ‘Weight, measurements, medical history, photographs.’

  ‘That will be all.’ Mengele ignored Arturas and read the records, then smiled and patted the boy’s head. ‘Do you like chocolate?’

  Arturas nodded uncertainly, stifling a cough.

  Mengele gave the boy chocolate and smiled as Arturas stuffed it in his mouth. He gripped the boy’s left wrist, twisting it to see the number. ‘458. Good.’ His eyes were alight with excitement. ‘Tuberculosis.’ He consulted the records again. ‘This twin was infected with the disease two weeks ago.’

  ‘Has the source of infection been isolated?’

  ‘Live tuberculosis bacilli have been injected directly into his lungs. I chose twenty of our children to send to Neuengamme, for Heissmeyer to conduct such experiments. A favour… he needs to present original work for his professorship.’

  ‘He’s found a vaccine? I thought that line of research had been disproven.’

  Mengele’s smile held contempt. He indicated the child. ‘I want to conduct my own research to verify Heissmeyer’s hypothesis that race is a factor in resistance to the disease. ‘The boy displays symptoms of extrapulmonary TB. I wish to discover how the disease has affected the internal organs: lymphatic, skeletal, gastrointestinal, genitourinary and central nervous system. Does it impair heart function as well as lung function? Are the kidneys, brain and liver affected?’

  ‘You’ll send blood for analysis?’

  Mengele turned away to scrub his hands and forearms. ‘Use the wrist restraints
as before, and the leg restraints.’

  ‘Is that necessary?’

  Mengele spun on one heel, his eyes icy. ‘You question my instructions?’

  He snapped to attention. ‘No, Herr Doktor.’

  Mengele nodded his satisfaction. He picked a scalpel from a dish of instruments.

  The boy’s eyes went wide with fear. ‘Mama, Mama…’

  Deep down, he’d know all along what Mengele planned: he’d been too afraid to admit it. He’d gambled with the boys’ lives and lost. ‘I’ll administer the anaesthesia.’

  ‘A waste of resources. Put a cloth in the boy’s mouth to stifle his screams, Hans. Screaming children give me a headache.’

  ‘Josef…. For pity’s sake…’

  The scalpel in Mengele’s hand paused mid-air. ‘The gag?’

  He found cloth and gently inserted it into Arturas’s mouth. He must do something.

  ‘You notice his eyes are different colours, of course.’

  He swallowed, his mouth dry. ‘Heterochromia iridii… It’s common enough in Roma and Sinti families.’

  Mengele nodded. ‘We’ll send them to Verschuer for further study.’

  ‘Josef, please…’ The bright line of blood oozing from the boy’s chest and abdomen froze the words in his throat. He put a hand over his mouth and backed towards the door. A syringe lay on a side table. The boy’s muffled screams followed him as he grabbed it and a part-used phial of Phenol, ran from the room and vomited in the passage.

  Coward, coward. He couldn’t save Arturas but there was one thing he could do. Mengele’s voice, hard and derisive called him back. He went on leaden feet. The boy’s eyes, stricken with terror, pleaded with him.

  Holy Mary, mother of God…

  Mengele lifted the boy’s bowels from the abdominal cavity and spread them across his stomach ignoring the sobs and screams. ‘Keep still… Sinti scum.’

  He positioned his thumb on the loaded syringe.

  Mengele examined the intestines minutely. ‘This seems normal. Let’s have a look at the kidneys.’

  The child whimpered. Wide eyes stared into his, small fingers clenched around his hand. He brought the syringe from behind his back. Mengele was intent on his work. He hesitated. Mengele’s demise wouldn’t save the children: but for Josef’s experiments they’d be sent straight to the gas. All he could give Arturas was a quicker death. He injected the child’s arm and slipped the syringe in his pocket.