The Girl I Left Behind

by Andie Newton

  ‘She’s perfect for this game,’ he said. ‘Now let’s play. My tea is getting cold.’ His voice was familiar, but it wasn’t from inside Hinzert—somewhere else. Munich? Nuremberg? The bend in my knee curved a little more as I tried to place it, then I looked at him without permission. His hair was thick and wavy now, but there was no mistaking his sour look or the way he wore his clothes; a size too small and buttoned to his neck. I wouldn’t dare speak his name, not in front of the other guard, but I said it in my mind. Hans. The Falcon from Nuremberg who betrayed Wilhelm and Claudia, along with every single one of us.

  ‘Fine.’ The guard threw me into a chair and shoved me into the desk, pinning me between the two. ‘This is Betteln.’

  Hans sat on the corner of the desk with his arms folded and his cup of tea near his thigh. ‘Tell us a good story and plead your case as to why you deserve an item from the cloakroom…’

  I felt my right eye constrict into a stinky squint. I remembered the game well, the game Alma had told me the guards played, the game Claudia played to win her freedom. ‘I know how it’s played, and if you think I’m going to give you a laugh—think again.’

  Hans tapped his fingers on his forearm. ‘Give me some time with this one… alone.’ We stared at each other and I was sure he knew I had recognized him.

  The guard tugged on my hair. ‘Yeah, knock some sense into her. The radio isn’t working and my foot is tired from the kicking.’ He walked out of the room and locked the door behind him.

  The room got quiet. Hans rubbed the back of his neck and closed his eyes as if he were thinking about something. I pushed myself back from the desk and braced my feet against the floor like a cat about to pounce. But I knew I didn’t have the strength to do much of anything. My words were all I had.

  ‘Damn, Sascha, you’re the last one I expected to see in prison.’ He opened his eyes and exhaled. ‘I thought you’d go all the way.’

  His tone confused me. He made it sound like I had let him down, when I expected him to gloat, talk about how he’d fooled Wilhelm and slipped a leaflet in his pocket. ‘You seem disappointed.’

  ‘You were the only Falcon I knew was still active.’

  I stood and poked my finger into his chest. ‘You killed the Falcons.’

  ‘No, no, no. That was your friend, Sarah. Not me.’ He pushed my finger back, and I sat back down.

  ‘Sarah?’ I said. ‘You were the one Wilhelm cursed as he was arrested. You were the one cavorting at the Hütt’n. The restaurant only Nazis went to.’

  His eyes lowered into a lazy gaze. ‘Let me guess, Sarah told you this? Do you think it was a coincidence she sent you to the antiques shop on the very night it got busted? Or that Claudia got nabbed just after Sarah went to fetch her?’

  I sank into the chair, my mind racing. Sarah?

  ‘I was transferred to Hinzert last week,’ he said. ‘I’ve been in Poland working undercover for the British. I thought Claudia might have told you.’

  ‘Claudia? You’ve talked to her?’

  ‘Not since I helped her escape from this place,’ he said.

  ‘That was me, Hans. I helped her escape. I was the one who picked her prison number for Betteln, and she used her prize to escape through the prison bars. Lard, as I recall. She always had some in her rucksack to help with her wigs.’

  He chuckled. ‘It’s one thing to rig the selection for Betteln, but it’s quite another to secure an escape route that won’t get you shot by the nearest guard on duty.’

  My face jolted. ‘You saw me when I came to Hinzert, when I worked for the Reich?’

  ‘I was sent to Hinzert for field orientation before the Reich sent me abroad, and I saw you touring the grounds. But I didn’t know Claudia was a prisoner until they brought her in for the game.’

  A moment of silence passed between us. So much had happened since we were both Falcons in Nuremberg. And to think all this time I thought it was Hans who had tricked us, when really it was Sarah. It blew my mind.

  ‘Have you kept in touch with the other Falcons?’ he said. ‘What ever happened to Geb?’

  Max. I tried to imagine his face, but it was gone, washed away with the rain. ‘I don’t know where he is.’ It sickened me to think Max was anywhere else other than living the life he had created in Munich. The Gestapo fought him back when they arrested me, they didn’t know who he really was then, and I never said his name during interrogations, no matter how many times they hit me.

  Hans laced his fingers together on top of his head and exhaled. I didn’t know what he was thinking, but by the sag in his eyes I was pretty sure he pitied me—he was still undercover, while I was a scraggly has-been whose own carelessness had got her caught.

  ‘Don’t do that,’ I said.

  ‘Do what?’

  ‘Feel sorry for me,’ I said. ‘I’ll be fine.’

  ‘No, Sascha. You won’t.’ He shook his head as if he knew something I didn’t. ‘The Night and Fog prisoners are being transferred. My guess is they have plans for you, plans more brutal than you’ve experienced here.’

  ‘They’re moving me?’ There was a sense of familiarity with Hinzert, I knew the tortures well, and I realized I’d die there. Thinking of dying somewhere else seemed strange.

  ‘Listen,’ he said. ‘You need to play this game. You’ll get to pick something from your property, and the coat you were arrested in is in the cloakroom. Afterwards, the guards want me to chain you up in the courtyard, and with the coat you could hide. Remember the border fence when you visited?’

  I thought back to the tour I had with Alma and the camp kommandant. ‘I think I do.’ I remembered something about a missing section of fence near the forest’s edge, a portion you couldn’t see from the compound. ‘Are you talking about the part that was torn down so they could bring in supplies?’

  He nodded. ‘Just look out for the dogs. They run loose around the perimeter.’

  My heart skipped and then banged against my rib cage when I realized what he was really saying, what I could do when nobody was watching. ‘I can escape.’

  Heavy footsteps thumped down the corridor. The guard was on his way back. Hans swung his eyes to the door and then back to me. ‘First, there’s something I need to do.’

  He opened the desk’s top drawer and pulled out a roll of tape. ‘I have to make it look like I did something bad to you.’ He tore a short piece of tape from the roll and stuck it over my mouth. ‘The shifts change at midnight. You’ll know the time because the lights on the outbuildings flicker on the stroke. Head west, it’s only a day’s walk to Luxembourg. The Allies are making their way there from Belgium. A pocket of freedom.’

  The door unlocked and the guard marched in with an agitated look. ‘You done yet?’

  Hans ripped the tape from my mouth. ‘Now I am,’ he said, and I closed my eyes from the burn.

  The guard sat in a chair on the other side of the desk next to the closet door. He adjusted his belt with one hand. ‘Well… get on with it,’ he said. ‘I’ve been waiting all day, and my wife’s expecting a good story when I get home.’

  I coughed up some blood from my fragile lungs and spat it on the floor. ‘What do you want to hear?’

  ‘You’re the spy,’ the guard said. ‘I’m sure you have something locked away in that head of yours.’ Moments passed, but I couldn’t think of anything, and the guard became impatient, thumping his feet on the floor and barking at Hans. ‘I thought you said she’d play?’

  Hans lunged at me with his hand raised high in the air.

  ‘All right, all right,’ I said with a wince. ‘I’ll talk.’

  Hans rested his hip on the side of the desk and folded his arms while I gazed directly into the guard’s eyes. My hair had been loped off months ago, and cut close to my head, but I swear I could feel my old frizzy locks brushing against my shoulders as I flipped my head from side to side and sat up tall.

  I talked about Louise’s girdle, how it squeaked like a child’s toy. I told t
hem about Hoffmann’s drinking, and made up a story about how I peed in his whisky bottle, but nothing I said got a reaction. When the guard clenched his fist and studied the white of his knuckles, I knew I had to dig deep.

  ‘But you want to know how I really got to the top? I shaved all the hair from my body down below and didn’t wear underwear for a week.’

  He gulped, but Hans smiled, looking very proud.

  ‘My wife’s going to love that one,’ the guard said. He opened the closet door with a punch from the side of his fist; brown bags labelled with numbers were stacked as high as the ceiling. My coat, visible, and folded on the shelf.

  He waved a finger at Hans. ‘Tie her up outside.’

  *

  Hans chained me up by one wrist to an iron post in the far corner of the clay courtyard. It was tight enough to fool the guard who accompanied us outside, but loose enough to fit through as long as I could crack a bone to do it. So many times I was made to stand in the clay courtyard—the same courtyard I saw Claudia in—guards wielding whips at my back or hunks of wood with nails bored into the end. But my mind was on something else. I looked beyond the huts, where the broken, rain-swept night sky met the pitch-black gash of the forest and thought: freedom.

  Hans put a pie tin filled with cold porridge onto the clay ground—a prisoner’s dinner. The mush slopped over the sides and looked more like vomit than a meal. ‘Remember the dogs,’ Hans whispered as he left. I scooped handfuls of it into my coat pocket for later and lapped the rain that pooled in the tile’s divots. Then I tightened my prison sandals, and waited on bended foot for the right moment to run.

  The lights flickered on the outbuildings. I squeezed my hand through the chain, tugging, gritting, pulling, glancing up at the guard tower, anticipating signs of life, pointing rifles, until I heard a loud crack in my thumb, and the chain slipped off.

  I escaped across the soggy field, wheezing from failing lungs, with my eyes set on two fence posts with nothing but the night and forest between them. My legs felt like gelatine, wobbly and soft, as if my bones had liquefied.

  Out of nowhere a racing growl came up behind me. I turned around in the dark, shaking and scared. ‘Here, boys,’ I said, weakly, scooping the mush from my pocket. ‘Here…’ The dog’s snarls turned into whines. One dog licked the mush from my hand and my broken thumb dangled in its mouth.

  When they finished eating, they simply trotted off.

  I tore the red triangle patch off my chest. I’m not your prisoner. A pang of guilt hit me as I stole one last glimpse of the prison huts glimmering in the distance, thinking of all the others left behind—the girl with the nibbled ears and the one with the missing eye—before ducking into the forest, dark-blind, and heavy.

  I went as far as I could until my legs gave out, buckling like snapped twigs, then I started to crawl, the thrust of my hips and the withered strength of my forearms, pushing through the rich, peaty ground. It wasn’t uncommon to hear the rumble of tanks coming from the woods, and if there were tanks, there were troops. I would have to keep my head down when the sun came up.

  By midday, the arms of my coat were riddled with gaping holes and my elbows looked as raw as boiled ox tail. My legs had turned purple, stunk of diseased meat and had tiny iridescent ants swarming in the cuts.

  I came to a wide clearing dotted with stumps and burnt trees that crisscrossed each other. In the middle, a bottomless sinkhole swirled like a vat of quicksand with the tail of a plane sticking out of it; the charred image of a swastika painted on its side. Pieces of the plane’s cockpit, wings and the propeller circled around it in chunked-up bits. No signs of the pilot.

  I didn’t think I had the strength to walk around it, the clearing stretched for kilometres in both directions—I had to go through it.

  I waited for a sound, any kind of movement to give me warning, but I heard nothing that resembled the rumble of a tank. A woodpecker chipped at a tree trunk in the far distance, the hush of a soft wind blew through the pine trees, and I limped, one bloody stump of a foot dragging behind the other. Halfway through, a handful of black birds burst from the trees, their chirps turning into caws. The ground shook, vibrated almost, and the air hummed with the sound of Panzers.

  I limped faster and faster—it was too late to go back—as three tanks broke into the clearing and down a rustic road that disappeared into the forest behind me, hurdling small earthen mounds like giant, skipping rocks.

  My limp turned into a desperate, painful gallop, and they fired; the hiss and sneer of their bullets marked by bursts of kindling on the ground in front of me. I tripped and fell into a rise of jagged shrapnel that sliced my shin and cut my lip—my body too numb to feel the pain. Two holes made from something incredibly sharp poking out of the ground, appeared in the centre of my palms. I collapsed, the hum of the tanks fading into the background. I didn’t think I could go on and thought about dying. Then I saw something sticking out of my pocket, something I hadn’t seen in months: my yellow scarf. I gave it a light tug, pulling it from my pocket and held it in my hand.

  I swallowed the only drop of saliva I had left on my tongue and it lumped in my throat like a rock. I’m too exhausted to go on. My heart began to slow, so much so I could feel the stillness between each thump. My face sank into a patch of soft black dirt, and I felt my skin melt into the ground like a candle waxing in its dish. But then I heard a voice and felt hands on my shoulders trying to jostle me back to life. ‘Ella,’ she said. ‘Ella…’

  Claudia.

  I could barely make out her eyes, which grew with her smile. ‘Roll over,’ she said. ‘They’re coming.’ Soft lips pressed against my cheek, and like a bolt my conscious had slammed back into my body. My chest filled with air and I rolled over, gasping as if I had been underwater.

  Tyres rumbling in the near distance screeched to a stop near my head. Shuffled feet scurried in all directions, one pair of dusty boots stood next to my head. Through dried mud and the blare of the sun, I saw the shadowed outline of a man staring down at me.

  ‘Mademoiselle,’ he said in a broken French accent. ‘Mademoiselle.’

  He bent to his knees, and a coarse hand swiped dirt from my face. The lines near his eyes multiplied with his smile. Dark eyebrows grew over deep-set hazel eyes with thick lashes. A beard of dust shadowed his jaw line, which made him look distinguished rather than gritty. But it was the roundness of his face and the sweetness of his voice that confused me… he wasn’t German, British or French.

  I traced the rim of his helmet with my finger. It was weather-beaten green with torn netting across the top with an unfastened chinstrap dangling from one side. My arm went limp. He caught it by the wrist and held it gently in his hand. ‘I’m an American soldier. I’ll save you,’ he said in English. He spun a finger in the air and shouted at someone I couldn’t see. ‘We’re packing her up, getting out of here.’ He plucked the scarf from my other hand, shook it out and then tucked it into a small pocket hidden in his faded green uniform.

  I didn’t understand everything he said, but I picked out the American part and that we were leaving. It had been years since I studied English, before the Reich took it out of the schools, and Christophe rarely used it around me. But it wasn’t much different than French and I could speak a little of it if I had to, if I needed to.

  I wasn’t sure how the Americans would treat a German. Would they think I was a scout? Play off their sympathies and report back to the Reich what I had seen? I thought my chances of survival were better if I pretended to be from Luxembourg and spoke the language he’d expect: French.

  ‘Américaine?’ I said.

  He nodded.

  ‘Est-ce le Luxembourg?’

  ‘Oui, Luxembourg,’ he said. ‘Liberation day.’

  Liberation. I smiled, closing my eyes, a faint laugh gurgled in my throat. I made it.

  He scooped me in his arms, lifting me from the ground, and my bones felt as if they had been recalled from some faraway place to join with the re
st of my body.

  ‘Wait,’ I said, grappling for strength. ‘My friend, Claudia…’ I pointed back to where I’d been laying, lifting my head up, but saw only the mud outline of my body.

  He turned around. ‘Who?’

  And I realized I’d imagined her and sunk back into his arms.

  He carried me to the bed of a green military truck that had metal casings rolling around in the rippled grooves of its tail-end. He lay me next to a man with a bloody wound cut into his thigh, his body jittering like an engine, shell-shocked and weary. His shirt was torn, but I recognized the coat of arms pin on his right breast: Luxembourg Resistance.

  The soldier’s arms slipped away as he lay me down and the strangest sensation befell over me, one of falling off a high cliff with nothing below but some jagged rocks and a shallow stream. I was alone, more alone than I had ever been before. I pulled him back with my good hand, clenched his uniform by the buttons and dug my fingers desperately into the holes.

  ‘S’il vous plait… ne me quitte pas, ma famille est morte.’

  His forehead wrinkled. ‘I only speak a little…’

  Someone shouted at a near distance, ‘She wants you to stay with her. Family’s dead.’

  He cradled my head in his hands and spoke loud and slow, ‘Don’t worry, you’re in the hands of the United States 5th Armoured Division.’ His smile was dingy yellow, but his words were like a song.

  A medic swooped in out of nowhere and opened a small metal box filled with bandages. Then something poked me, and my body warmed as if I had drank an entire glass of brandy in one shot.

  ‘For the pain,’ the medic said in French.

  ‘Merci,’ I slurred. My eyes drooped to a close. I felt a lethargic smile tug on my lips. ‘Merci…’

  29