The Survivors Read online

  They stared openly. I walked with no sign of haste down that scrupulously swept aisle and inspected each face I passed. Long lazy ones, square ones, fair ones, frightened ones, angry ones, ones barely old enough to wield a razor. But none of them was the one I sought, the one with eyes as grey and sharp as a razor that could strip the layers of skin off you. With a broad flat forehead, which I had seen break a person’s nose, and a bony chin that he had asked me to shave.

  If I stood before him now, as I did then, with a razor poised between finger and thumb, would I lash out? Would I? Could I?

  ‘Guten Tag.’ The voice was soft.

  ‘Guten Tag, Herr Geissler,’ I said in greeting to the gaunt young figure in the bed near the far wall.

  He tried to sit up but didn’t make it, so I perched on the edge of his bed and prayed there were no fleas or lice.

  ‘I’m looking for someone, Herr Geissler.’

  He didn’t ask for whom. Or how I knew his name. His feverish eyes looked out of focus as they smiled up at me, eager to please. He couldn’t be more than eighteen or nineteen, a fine looking boy with skin as smooth as a girl’s.

  ‘I’m Fritz,’ he said.

  ‘Well, Fritz, I am told that there are four Germans billeted in this hut. Is that right?’

  He blinked. Yes.

  ‘Are the other three here now?’

  He glanced across at the empty beds next to his. His eyes moved slowly as if they hurt. ‘Nein. They are not here.’

  ‘Can you tell me their names?’

  ‘Hans Becke, Friedrich Taube and Reinald Weiner.’

  That tallied. Those were the names that Davide had given me.

  ‘Are any of them tall with blond hair and wearing spectacles with a cracked lens?’

  ‘No. They are blond. Like me. Not tall.’

  ‘Did a German come here today who wore cracked spectacles?’

  ‘Why do you ask?’

  ‘He is someone I am looking for. I saw him leaving here earlier.’

  He nodded. Just that small movement brought him out in a sweat. ‘Yes, you mean Jan Blach.’

  The name stunned me. I felt my jaw drop open.

  ‘What did he want?’

  ‘None of us know him. He said he was just checking on the Germans in the camp.’ He frowned. ‘He wants us all to be billeted together in huts just for Germans, so we don’t get spat on.’

  ‘Does he indeed?’

  There was no question that the German nation had suffered too during the war, its people battered and bloody. I knew that. The result was clear to see in the ruins of their cities. We all knew that. But I had to keep reminding myself. They’re not the ones who tore your nails out or beat you with rubber hoses, or put a bullet in your friend’s throat. But sometimes the sound of their language on my tongue made me retch. They shot my husband out of the sky and he died in a ball of flames. Sometimes I think I hear his screams.

  ‘Did this Jan Blach mention what hut he is billeted in?’

  ‘No.’ The boy’s eyes were closing.

  ‘Fritz,’ I said softly, ‘you are sick. I think I should report it to the Medical Officer to—’

  His eyes shot open, wide and terrified. I placed a hand on the blanket where his leg underneath was suddenly shaken by tremors.

  ‘Hush,’ I murmured, ‘the doctors will make you better.’

  ‘Nein, nein, nein. No, don’t report it.’ His long pale fingers reached for me. ‘I know what they do to patients in the infirmary.’

  ‘Fritz, I promise you they will—’

  ‘No! They will do experiments on me. They will.’ The young German was shaking all over, his teeth chattering. ‘I was sent to Gross-Rosen concentration camp for helping an old Jewish man who fell over in the street. Dr Mengele was there, the SS officer and physician. He performed terrible inhuman experiments.’ The boy was sobbing. ‘Amputating limbs and sewing twins together and . . .’

  I moved further up the bed, unable to stop myself taking his hand in mine. ‘You’re safe here, Fritz. The British doctors here are kind. They will help you to—’

  ‘No. Please no. Don’t tell them.’

  His smooth cheeks glistened with tears, his pale eyelashes spiky, his mouth convulsed.

  ‘I’ll bring you some medicine to take here instead,’ I offered. Though how in hell’s name I could persuade the medics to cough up tablets of some sort without them whisking him into isolation in the infirmary, I didn’t know.

  ‘I beg you,’ his long desperate fingers clamped around mine, ‘tell no one. No tablets.’

  I knew what it was to beg. I knew what it was to plead for silence.

  ‘Very well, Fritz. But if you’re not a little better tomorrow, I will have to call in a medic.’

  His mouth softened into a trusting smile. ‘Thank you.’ His eyelids slid closed, too heavy for him to lift.

  I sat there for a long time stroking his hand.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Jan Blach. How could he bring himself to use that name? It was the name of my brother. He was killed on 25 September 1939 and Oskar Scholz knew it. Yet still he climbed into my brother’s dead boots and tramped through the camp in them. He wanted me to know, I am certain. He intended me to grieve all over again.

  On that September day in 1939 the skies over Warsaw had blackened with German Stuka aircraft. Five hundred tons of high explosive bombs rained down on my beloved beautiful city of Warsaw as though the devil had loosed his ravenous swarm of demons on us. Death and destruction gouged out the heart of the city and left it bleeding, while fires from incendiaries incinerated anything left standing. The flames seemed to set even the River Vistula alight as I stood on its banks, howling at the planes above me and clutching our four-year-old daughter in my arms.

  My husband was up there, somewhere in that hellish battle. In his PZL P.11 fighter. A brave pilot in the Polish air force; a David against the Nazi Goliath. On the ground the earth shook under our feet and the noise ripped our eardrums apart. Explosions and screams. The frantic rattle of antiaircraft guns and the blood-curdling shriek of dive bombers. Everywhere we heard the roar of the fires that swept the city and the rumble like thunder as buildings collapsed.

  And the dust. Dear God, the choking dust. It clogged our lungs. I didn’t know it then, as I spat my rage into the sky that a bomb had landed directly on my parents’ house, killing them instantly, along with my brother.

  Now Oskar Scholz had taken his name. Jan Blach. Don’t think it is an accident. Or a coincidence. Because I know it is not. He is goading me.

  There were four children perched like sparrows on my bed when I entered my hut. Relief spiked in tiny pinpricks along my skin when I saw that Alicja was one of them. She was laughing and for a moment I paused to listen to that sweet sound. It was rare. Or was it just around me that it was rare?

  The hut was busy, humming with the voices of women gathered into groups. Knitting. Darning. Sewing. Making garments stretch through the winter ahead. One was turning a square wool headscarf into a skirt for her little girl while the child watched wide-eyed, snatching at the colourful trails. This was a hut allocated just to women with children. No men. Those with husbands were billeted in the family huts where rivalries flared like small flash fires.

  Alicja once asked me why the women were always busy while the men sat around talking, scratching their bellies and smoking most of the day. I had no reply. No polite one anyway. Because they’re lazy sons of bitches. I bit down on my tongue and shrugged in silence.

  I liked these women. I liked their grit, their cussedness. Their instinct for survival. I liked the way they found smiles for their children on even the blackest of days and the ease with which they could reduce a stiff British army officer to a blushing jellyfish with their earthy teasing and suggestive hip-rolling. As I walked past the rows of metal beds, a scrawny Latvian with impatient dark eyes stepped out and clamped a hand on my wrist.

  ‘Klara, I need . . .’

  Before she had f
inished speaking, my ever-present notebook was out of my pocket and I was flicking through its dog-eared pages.

  ‘Need what?’ I prompted.

  ‘Spectacles. For close work. Can you . . . ?’

  ‘Ask at the Medical block. They provide them.’

  She uttered a thin screech of disgust. ‘They are taking months to get hold of any. In the meantime I can’t read, can’t sew, can’t write my own bloody name.’

  ‘I’ll do what I can,’ I promised and detached my wrist from her grip.

  Two steps further and a young blond woman called out, ‘I need a mirror, Klara.’ She was very pretty. I could see why she would want a mirror. I nodded and jotted down a note.

  Always I was pursued by the words I need.

  Alicja once told me I look fierce.

  Fierce? I was shocked. And hurt. Fierce? How did that happen? My husband used to tell me my face was so sunny it made him smile just to look at me. Now it is fierce. So as I approached the four children on my bed I forced it to look happy.

  ‘Ready?’ I asked cheerily.

  Four wide grins shot back at me. Four young heads nodded. I loved those grins. They were bright flames on which I warmed my cold hands. My bed stood at the far end of the hut, tucked in the corner. Safe. My back covered. It had cost me a hefty bribe to gain possession of it. Privacy and safety were two things that came at a high premium in Graufeld Camp and a corner spot provided both. So I’d paid through the nose but it was worth it to have a wall at my back, and I’d wangled a bunk bed, so that Alicja slept above me. Anyone coming at her would have to come through me first.

  Hanna had walked my daughter back from the laundry and set her son Rafal to guard her, but I could tell from the set of Alicja’s angular little shoulders that she was not happy with such protection. She was excited about tonight, so submitted with no complaint in case I banned her from being part of our mission. It wouldn’t be the first time.

  That’s how we termed it. Our mission. We planned it with military precision, each child playing their part. Alicja and Rafal were the seekers. The other two children, Izak and Alzbeta, were the distraction. They were all experienced. Watchful and patient beyond their tender years.

  Izak was a nine-year-old German Jew from Dresden who had been hidden in a wardrobe for three years by a neighbour after his parents were dragged off to Auschwitz. The neighbour risked her life every day for him. Sharing her scanty rations with him. Such courage. Such humanity. I never knew her but I admired her. Dead now. Burned alive by the infernal firestorm created by the Allied bombing of Dresden in February this year. Izak escaped, but one side of his face was burned to a kind of molten moonscape. He spoke little but followed me like a shadow, unless Alicja shooed him away. I think sometimes she did not like the way he leaned his body against mine as though I were a wall to keep him upright.

  The other child, Alzbeta, was the same age as Alicja, ten years old, a Czechoslovakian orphan, I think. I say I think, because she refused to speak about her parents. She was loud and bossy with dark bottlebrush hair that stuck up straight. She constantly bickered with the two boys but worshipped the ground Alicja walked on and I knew she would always be watching out for my daughter on the missions. She was quick-witted. She would look at me in that way of hers from under her thick smoky eyelashes and would give a little nod. We both knew I was relying on her.

  All four were my fledglings. I took care of them in the camp. I bound their wounds. I fought their corners. I dried their tears, I cleaned their fingernails and I read them stories whenever I could get my hands on one of the precious books in this place. I taught them maths with an enthusiasm bordering on obsession. I love numbers. They don’t lie. Not like words. I kept my fledglings safe.

  Why?

  I don’t like that question.

  I dared not use the word love. It was too dangerous. Too risky. It can blow up in your face. Too liable to bleed you dry when the loved one is taken away from you. So I used the word need instead. We needed each other.

  That would suffice. Need.

  I needed more than ever now to get myself and Alicja out of here. To do so, I needed the missions. For my missions I needed the children.

  There. No mention of love.

  I stroked each head, fed each child a Huntley & Palmer biscuit from the cache in a tin under my bed, and grinned back at them.

  ‘Ready?’

  The missions terrified me.

  ‘Mama.’

  Alicja twisted a fist into my cardigan, anchoring me to her, preventing me from stepping out of the hut after the other three children.

  ‘What is it, Alicja?’

  ‘Did you find him?’

  ‘Find who?’

  Even as I said the words, I regretted them. My daughter deserved better.

  ‘You know who, Mama. The man in the broken spectacles, the one who came out of the hut, the one you’re frightened of.’

  Her blue eyes always saw too much.

  ‘No, I didn’t find him. Not yet.’

  ‘Was he your lover?’

  My mouth fell open. Where did this come from? What does my daughter know about lovers?

  ‘No, sweetheart, he was never my lover. What on earth makes you think such a thing?’

  ‘Because . . .’ a faint finger of colour slid up her cheek, ‘you seemed to burst into flames when you saw him. So I thought . . .’

  ‘You thought wrong.’

  She gazed up at me, solemn as a judge in her dreary blue dress. I could see changes in her face during the five months we’d been trapped in the camp, the childish softness giving way to a firmer alignment of bones. She was beautiful. It took my breath away when I set eyes on her each morning. If anything she was growing more beautiful, her delicate features so exquisite, I feared for her. If I loved her enough, I would rid her of the burden of perfection. Because it would be her downfall. I should take a razor blade to her face, then no one would want her. But I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t. Did that mean I didn’t love her enough? Or that I loved her too much?

  ‘I was angry, Alicja. Angry with him. That’s all. I used to know him in Warsaw.’

  ‘Did he hurt you?’ She slipped her hand in mine.

  I wrapped my palm around her young fingers, glanced down at my own deformed fingertips, and took a long time to find a reply.

  ‘No, my darling, no. I hurt myself.’

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  ALICJA

  Alicja loved the darkness.

  It suited her. Soft as a fur mitten. It slid over her skin as she raced down the track through the woods, so fast that it wiped from her mind the look on her Mama’s face when she left her. She didn’t want to see her mother like that, white with fear.

  Rafal was running through the night two steps ahead of her, able to float over tree roots and dodge branches that were invisible to the rest of them. Izak and Alzbeta, who ran behind her, smacked straight into them, uttering grunts of pain, though all had promised no noise. Alicja copied the silent movements of Rafal, determined to follow his easy shift of step, but she didn’t have his eyes. He was a fox, a night animal. She could see his gingery hair flash silver when threads of moonlight trailed through the trees.

  Izak was the one frightened of the dark. She could feel his breath soft as feathers on the back of her neck. But if she’d been shut in a wardrobe for three years, maybe she’d be frightened of the dark too. He kept very close. Alzbeta, at the rear, was like Alicja, happy as hell to be out. Day or night, it didn’t matter.

  To be free.

  It meant everything.

  CHAPTER NINE

  I’d watched the four children go. It felt like a stake in my chest. It was always the same. I couldn’t decide whether it was guilt or fear. But either way I knew I would be fit for nothing till they squeezed their boneless young bodies back up through the drain.

  The narrow waste pipe ran from the back of the Laundry block down into the culvert on the other side of the perimeter wall, the one that empti
ed into the barren field that had once been a lush green spread of sugar beet. Stripped by desperate hands before the crop was even ripe. By day you’d be instantly spotted out there and the guards were trigger-happy. No one dared risk it. But by night you were as invisible as the owls that patrolled the nearby woods, soundless as lost souls.

  Stay silent, my love, and you will not be shot.

  No, no. Don’t. Don’t even think that. The British don’t shoot kids. They are not Nazis. Nor are they the barbaric Soviet Russians who are right now ripping the heart out of my beloved Poland. The camp had imposed a ten o’clock curfew in the evening, which meant we were obliged to remain in our huts till morning because they didn’t trust us in the dark. Rightly so. It was a unit of Polish soldiers in blue uniforms who patrolled our perimeter and I made a point of knowing each one of the bastards by sight. Observing how thorough – or slapdash – each one was at his job. The solid one with the permanent frown etched on his forehead was the one to watch. His name was Majewski. What was it about a uniform that twisted a man’s mind?

  Was it the uniform that did it for Oskar Scholz? Or did the devil already inside him climb out on the back of the swastika?

  This Majewski never laughed or turned a blind eye like some of them. He snapped handcuffs on your wrists tight enough to break your bones and marched you down to the local German Polizei for the slightest misdemeanour. The police didn’t like us. None of the locals did, because we were being fed while they starved.

  In their shoes I would hate us too.

  I was hunched beside the mouth of the drain in the pitch dark, the stench of it thick at the back of my throat. My eyes fixed on every shift of the blackness, as I pulled tighter the blanket wrapped around my shoulders. The night wind swept across from the harsh Russian steppes, carrying the icy fingers of the winter that lay ahead. And every moment I pictured my daughter. Running like a wild animal among people who hated her.