Do the Birds Still Sing in Hell? (15 page)

He was breathing harder now, almost grunting like an animal in the jungle. He’d passed the point of no return as he released his double-handed grip and his right hand moved from the small of her back to her buttock and down to the back of her thigh. Her head tilted forward and their eyes met once again. She leaned forward, kissed him again, and he let it linger for a second. She gazed at him with a puzzled, almost frightened expression. Horace stepped back and reached for the buttons on his flies. She shook her head in panic, looked across to the window but remained in exactly the same position. There was no resistance, no attempt to run.

Horace dropped his trousers to the floor and exposed his erection. He paused, their eyes locked on each other again, a gentle almost timid apologetic shake of her head and real fear in her eyes this time. He wanted to stop, call a halt to this madness. It was the longest few seconds of his life. He was about to make love to the enemy, about to screw the opposition. Getting caught would mean a charge of rape and certain death, perhaps the same fate for Rosa unless she could convince the authorities otherwise.

Horace took a step forward and took Rosa by the shoulders. He flung her round roughly and pushed her face forward onto the grime-covered bench. He reached for the hem of her skirt and pulled it upwards over her hips. Her modesty was covered by the thinnest of cotton, snow-white panties. Horace reached under her and pulled the material to one side as he eased two fingers into her moist vagina.

Rosa looked over her shoulder. ‘No… please, no. Stop. We’ll be caught.’

Horace wanted to stop. It was madness. The war was
madness, Polish prison camps were madness, throwing shit from trains and being starved to death was madness, claiming a tiny victory against the enemy was madness and yet he couldn’t help himself. Horace stepped forward, took a firm grip of the material of the panties and tore them from her as he cast them onto the dirty floor. He took a step forward and edged her legs apart with his knees. Her breathing became laboured; the muscles in her buttocks seemed to tighten as Horace placed a hand on each hip. His penis hovered and probed at the entrance of her vagina and in one swift, well-executed movement he thrust deep inside her. Rosa let out a squeal. They would be heard; someone would surely hear them.

Horace was past caring. A bullet in the back of the head would be worth it as long as he could get through the next few minutes. Horace pumped and thrust for all he was worth. The German girl was a piece of meat for his own pleasure. The German girl was an object, a thing. The German girl was the enemy and he, Joseph Horace Greasley, was having full blown sex with one of the enemy’s girls while they kept him captive… there was no greater feeling in the world.

Rosa squirmed and yelped beneath him as her own hand muffled her cries while Horace pushed her hips roughly into the hard wooden work surface, thrusting as hard and as deep into her as was physically possible. Within a few short minutes he had climaxed and collapsed forward, breathing heavily as his face lay inches from hers. He could feel the silken texture of her hair on his face, smell her sweet breath expending in spasms as she recovered. And he wanted somehow to lie with her forever.

But he couldn’t. She was the enemy.

He reached to the floor and pulled up his trousers, gazing at the beautiful shape of her young backside, the form of her
hips and her firm thighs still tantalisingly parted, revealing the downy cleft of pubic hair.

Rosa made no attempt to move. She whimpered quietly, almost purred like a cat. He wanted to hold her; he wanted to tell her how special the moment had been. He wanted to kiss and caress her and walk in the summer sunshine discussing the lovemaking like he had with Eva oh, so long ago. He wanted to plan their next tryst, their next forbidden moment of death-defying passion.

Without a word Horace turned and left the workshop. He strolled almost casually into the still, warm afternoon air as a tear ran the length of his face and fell onto the parched dusty ground.

It wasn’t a dream. It had happened. The first rays of the early morning sun strained through the barred windows and picked their way through the tiny particles of dust that always seemed to hang in the air. Horace lay awake, the only one of the 30 prisoners.

It had happened. He’d screwed one of the enemy’s girls right there in a prisoner of war camp, right there under the noses of the German guards, of the camp commandant and even more incredibly, under the nose of her father who couldn’t have been more than 25 yards away.

It wasn’t a dream. He lay there with a peculiar satisfied smile on his face. Half-starved, incarcerated, a slave and a puppet to the enemy who could command of him anything they wanted and take his life anytime they wanted, yet he was still smiling. Oh, how he wished he could tell them everything he’d achieved. How he wished he could tell these fucking bastards about how much shit he’d thrown in their comrades’ faces, how he wished he could tell them about the many victories he’d achieved during his time with them.

But most of all he wished he could tell them how he’d fucked one of their own, right there under their noses. She chose me, he wanted to tell them. Even as a downtrodden, filth-ridden, half-starved, enslaved creature with a status lower than a sewer rat… she’d chosen him above them. His hair was unkempt, the flesh hung from his bones, his second-hand, ill-fitting dead man’s uniform flattered him little. As he remembered the SS soldiers’ lectures at the first camp and their claims that the German man would always be his superior, he laughed out loud at the fact he’d just blown that theory out of the water.

‘What the fuck have you got to laugh about, Jim, you mad bastard?’

It was Flapper.

Horace leaned over the top bunk. Flapper’s eyes had just opened.

‘Don’t you see how they’ll never beat us, Flapper? They can take our freedom but they’ll never beat us. We’re better than them, bigger than them.’

He wanted to tell his friends and comrades, his fellow prisoners all about his conquest. He wanted to tell them, boost their morale; he wanted every single one of them to laugh behind the Germans’ backs. But he couldn’t.

Flapper groaned then let out a deep sigh. ‘Like I say, Jim, you’re one mad bastard.’

Horace leapt from his bunk. He had to tell them to be strong, never to give up hope. He didn’t know where the inspiration came from or who or what had given him the power of oration, but something strange happened as he delivered his lecture to his friend. A few others around them had begun to waken; he turned to face them.

‘We’ll win this war, lads, I’m telling you, we just need to believe it deep in our hearts and if we want it badly enough,
if we want that Austrian eunuch to get his comeuppance then that’s what will happen. We must hold our heads up high. When they turn that key at night, when they dish out the orders and the beatings, we must believe in ourselves, believe we are better than them.’

To a man they had congregated in front of Horace. Several lay on the floor in a sleepy trance listening to the emotional rant of a miner’s son from a small village in Leicestershire. They could have been listening to one of Churchill’s finest speeches, such was his impassioned delivery.

‘Have you noticed lately how quiet the Germans are? Remember how they taunted us almost weekly about the bombing of London and how the Luftwaffe controlled the skies over Europe? Remember them singing and dancing as they announced that Coventry had been razed to the ground, and how they’d bombed Liverpool and Bristol? Remember, lads, remember?’

A few heads nodded, a few murmurs of agreement. The moments when the German soldiers and camp commandant delivered their version of the way the war was going were the low points for the prisoners. They had no way of knowing whether the Germans were telling the truth. Sure, they would exaggerate, everyone knew that, but just how far would they go? Had a few bombs fallen on the outskirts of Coventry or, as the Germans were suggesting, had it been decimated and flattened? No one knew. The civilian workers in the camp had offered titbits of information but even they were listening to their radio sets in an occupied land. Just how much were the news reports influenced by the Germans?

‘Well, they aren’t fucking singing and dancing now, are they? In fact when was the last time you saw a smile on the bastards’ faces? That’s because we are winning, lads. The tide is turning.’

In reality nobody was winning the war. Every country involved was on the losing side. The young men of Britain and France and Russia and Germany were being massacred. The broken bodies of civilian men women and children right across Europe and beyond littered the city streets.

But far worse things were happening in the concentration camps in Germany and Poland and Czechoslovakia as Hitler began to implement his master plan for world domination. Hitler and his generals had begun the mass extermination of whole nations, ethnic and religious groups, gypsies, homosexuals and the mentally unstable. Although at the time the POWs didn’t know it, the Second World War would become the deadliest and most destructive war in human history, claiming an estimated 72 million lives. Hitler’s regime would wipe nearly five million Jews off the face of the earth, gassing them in the concentration camps of Eastern Europe. The Polish nation would lose over 16 per cent of its entire population and by the end of the war nearly 27 million Russians would have lost their lives.

Unfortunately, by the summer of 1941 the war was showing no sign of slowing down. In 1941 alone, Yugoslavia, Russia, Bulgaria, Finland and Hungary were dragged into the conflict. Towards the end of the year the Japanese would attack Pearl Harbor in Hawaii where a huge American naval fleet lay at anchor, dragging the most powerful nation on earth into the Second World War. Horace didn’t know any of this as he continued.

‘So you think the war’s coming to an end, Jim?’ asked a corporal from the King’s Own Scottish Borderers.

Horace spoke with a passion, with a sincere belief that it was. He wanted to believe it, simply had to believe it, but nothing could have been further from the truth. Little did he know as he sat on Garwood’s bunk while the entire dormitory
listened to him, that he would be involved in the conflict for another four long years.

‘We must laugh at them, laugh at them behind their backs. Sure they can turn the key each evening and they can make us work ten hours a day, but the irony is we are working on the gravestones of their comrades.’

Horace grinned like a Cheshire cat. ‘How fucking great is that?’

The assembled men broke out into raucous laughter.

‘Let us work harder, let’s smile and laugh and joke as we cut each slab. Let us taunt the Germans as we carve each cross, tell them “This one’s for you” with a big smile.’

‘Only the ones that don’t speak English, Jim,’ Ernie Mountain interjected. ‘Remember, you took a good beating at the last camp because one of the bastards spoke English.’

Horace paused for a few seconds as he recalled those dark days. But he also remembered how he took strength and an inner pride from the incident. He remembered those first few tentative steps from the medical room and although physically he was as weak as a kitten, mentally he was as strong as two lions. He remembered looking at the men in the back of the lorry as they left that hell hole. A mass of human misery – dejected, almost defeated, skin pulled tightly round their cheekbones, eyes hollow and sunken. Some wore hats to protect them from the cold, some had none, just shaven heads with sporadic tufts of straw like hair. Living, breathing corpses.

Horace’s impromptu speech came to an abrupt end.

‘
Steigen Sie aus
!’ – ‘Get out!’ – the German guards screamed as they burst into the dormitory. Horace couldn’t help feeling their tone appeared more aggressive than normal. His suspicions were confirmed as they took their place on parade and two German SS officers stood talking
with the camp commandant over on the far side of the compound. At the sight of their uniforms Horace’s blood turned to ice. The memories came flooding back: the cruelty of the SS men on the long march to Luxembourg and the pleasure and joy they seemed to radiate during the beatings and killings in the first camp.

They walked over towards the POWs on parade. Even the camp commandant looked ill at ease in their company. They looked evil, stone-faced and thin-lipped. God knows what evil acts these two men had carried out. Horace recalled the rumours of the death camps, the massacres and mass executions of the Poles and Slavs and wondered, just wondered, if the stories could be true. He wondered about the selection and recruitment procedures for the SS. Did they deliberately choose the evil-looking ones? Was there a series of initiation ceremonies they all had to go through? Did they need to demonstrate just how bad they were before they were accepted into the ranks?

One of the SS officers stepped forward. He spoke perfect English, almost fluent. He announced that the SS would be inspecting the camp once a month. He’d heard reports that the current regime was too soft. The prisoners must remember that they were prisoners, slave workers, and they must show respect to the master German race.

He announced that the working day would be longer. Horace didn’t mind, more time with Rosa, more German crosses. He smiled.

In an instant the SS officer caught the look and walked over to where Horace stood. ‘Is something funny, English pig?’ he bellowed, inches from Horace’s face. He drew his Luger pistol from his holster. He waved the gun in front of Horace’s face. ‘Do you think this is funny?’

Horace’s experience told him to keep quiet. Anything he
said, any gesture he made would be turned around and construed as an insult.

‘Answer me! Do you think this is funny?’

Horace remained silent.

‘Don’t you understand your own language, you English dog?’

The SS officer cocked the pistol and held it at arm’s length, inches from Horace’s face.

Horace’s legs took on an involuntary tremble as beads of perspiration appeared on his forehead.

‘Sweating like a little English pig,’ the officer announced, and in one swift, powerful movement with all the strength he could muster, he clattered Horace across the side of the head with the handle of the gun.