It was too strong. She was trapped
inside.
Her shoulder ached from throwing herself
against the door, and she had skinned her hands on the rough wood.
She sat down on the edge of the iron bedstead, thinking she was
about to cry, but she didn’t cry. All she could remember was that
soon it would be over—either the Russians would burn down the camp,
and she would die inside this room, or they would find her and kill
her as a collaborator, or they would set her free. One way or the
other, it would all be finished in a few hours.
She had no idea of how long she had been
sitting there when suddenly there was the sound of boot heels on
the floor outside.
The Russians? It couldn’t be the Russians,
not so soon. Esther could still hear their guns firing in the
distance, louder now but still far away. The Russians were still
far off.
It was Hagemann. He had remembered and was
coming back to kill her. It would be like him to leave it to the
last, to let her begin almost to believe that he was gone forever
and then to come back so he could make a slow job of her death.
He would cut her throat—he had threatened to
often enough. He would grab her by the hair, pull back her head,
and push the point of the knife across from one side to the other,
taking his time. He would want to enjoy himself.
She tried not to make a sound, to pretend she
didn’t exist. It was no good thinking she could fight him off—she
had never been able to resist him. She had always been too
frightened of him for that. And now the doorknob rattled, and the
key turned in the lock with a snap. . .
“Esther, I’m surprised to find you here.
Didn’t he take you with him?”
It was not Hagemann. It was the General.
He was carrying a gas lantern that threw a
thick, yellowish halo of light across the floor and made his pink,
heavy, utterly familiar face look cavernous and deathlike. He set
the lantern down on a table and pulled up its shade, flooding the
room with light.
“I didn’t want to give the Russian spotters
something to shoot at,” he said “They’re only about six hours away.
I was just having a final look around before I left.”
“Is. . . Is Hagemann—?”
“No. No, my dear.” The General shook his head
sadly, as if he were beginning to realize that the joke was on him.
“They’ve all gone, some time ago. You and I, I’m afraid, are the
only ones still here. Come along—I expect you must be hungry.”
It was a cool April night as they walked
through the deserted camp. In the east, the horizon was a burning
red. The flashes from the Russian artillery provided almost the
only light, throwing the guard towers and garrison buildings into
sudden relief against the flaming night sky. The General carried
his lantern and moved with long strides, hardly seeming to
notice.
Finally they came to the officers’ mess.
Esther found some bread and a plate of cold ham. and they sat down
at one of the large tables.
“We’ll leave in a few minutes,” he said. He
wasn’t eating. He didn’t seem to be hungry. “The British have
reached the Elbe, so we’ll head for them. You’ll come with me,
Esther. I don’t like to think what the Russians would do with a
pretty child like you.”
“And what of you,
Herr General
?”
“Me?” The question seemed genuinely to
surprise him. “I should, on the whole, prefer to be hanged by the
British rather than by the Russians, but that aside, it makes
remarkably little difference. I’m afraid I have been a very wicked
man, my dear. I’m on the lists, so certainly they will hang
me.”
He closed his eyes for a moment, as if dying
already in imagination.
“You are wondering, perhaps, why I don’t
simply shoot myself? It is a fair question. I am a Catholic. I
should like to die in a state of grace.”
There had been over fifteen hundred prisoners
at the Waldenburg camp. They were all dead now, shot on the
General’s orders, and their bodies lay not two hundred meters from
where the General was commenting on the state of his soul. Esther
put down her sandwich—she too had lost her appetite.
“But don’t be too scornful of me, Esther
dear. One’s duty sometimes takes strange forms.”
“You are a butcher. I heard the firing squads
this afternoon—you murdered all of them.” She could hardly believe
that she was saying such a thing. It was like asking to be
killed.
“Yes, my dear, I did.” He made a gesture with
his gloved hand, a vague pass through the air as if wiping
something away. “But I haven’t had you killed.”
“You gave me to Hagemann.”
For an instant he looked as if she had struck
him—yes, the accusation had gone home. And then, just as quickly,
he recovered himself and smiled.
“I did do that. But you see, my dear, he
needed distracting. It gave him something else to think about while
I. . . I suppose you are alive now only because in the confusion he
forgot your existence, and now you will live, the only witness,
because of my caprice. I’m sorry about Hagemann, Esther, but that’s
not why I’ve saved you. You see, I discover I have a use for
you.”
Half an hour later they left in the General’s
car—his driver apparently, had fled with the others. Esther sat on
the front seat, the case containing the General’s violin resting on
her lap. “I will spend my remaining days of freedom practicing the
Mendelssohn F Minor,” he had said, “now that it will no longer be
proscribed.”
They didn’t dare use the headlights, but
there was a moon and the night sky was like glass. She didn’t want
to look at anything anyway, her arm burned where he had tattooed on
the number.
They had had to go over to the prisoners’
side of the camp to find the instruments, and she had seen the open
parade ground where fifteen hundred corpses were stacked together
like cord wood. She had heard the shooting. She had known all
afternoon what they were doing, and she still couldn’t believe it.
All those men, some of them still bleeding through the bullet holes
in the backs of their necks. The General hadn’t even glanced at
them.
“It is your authentication,” he had said.
“This way, no one will ever be able to say you were anything here
except a prisoner. I will drop you off at Hamburg—when the war is
over, you will be well inside the American occupation zone. I
myself plan to go on to Ulm. My mother lives in Ulm, and it is as
good a place as any. It will be interesting to see how long the
Allies take to arrest me.”
What had he been talking about? The words had
buzzed in her head like flies, just an empty noise. She didn’t
understand anything anymore. She had imagined she understood, but
she had been mistaken. It was impossible, even indecent. There were
no reasons. There was only death—and the terrible emptiness of the
living.
And why had he branded her? He had the number
on a slip of paper—he had taken it from his wallet, even as they
sat in the officers’ mess, staring at each other over their broken
meal. This had been no inspiration of the moment.
She could wonder, but she found it impossible
to care.
“I was very fond of you, Esther. You must
always remember that.” As the car lurched over the pock-marked
road, unrepaired since the winter because there hadn’t been time
for anything except the suspense of fear, he spoke as if he were
already dead. “I saved you from the gas chambers and kept you
alive. Think of me with some kindness, since I don’t imagine this
chapter of your life will ever quite close.”
They had hardly escaped the perimeter of the
camp when the first artillery shell exploded behind them. The sound
was like nothing she could have imagined. The air seemed dyed red
with noise. And then the cold, numbing silence afterward. . .
Have I been hit?
she wondered.
This
pain in my belly—I think. . .
Oh. God. she would die. Now she would. Now. .
.
She opened her eyes with a start. It was like
catching herself in a fall, only she hadn’t been falling. There was
no cannon fire now, only blackness. Where was the—? Gone—dead for
months now. Even in the darkness, the prison walls closed around
her. She had been dreaming.
And then the pain came again, shooting
straight through like a ragged piece of metal. That was real.
She rolled over on the plank bed—why had they
switched off the light?—and found its edge with the palm of her
hand. She wanted to get up, to reach the door, to cry out that she
needed help. If she could just. . .
When it came again—like something twisting,
cutting at her bowels—she screamed. It made the pain worse, but she
couldn’t help herself. The scream came of its own accord, pushing
the sharp point in deeper. It wore her out so that she couldn’t
breathe; she tried, but it was agony. The pain came in surges now,
tearing at her. She screamed again, but there was no air.
When the door opened, all she could think
about was how the light hurt, how it seemed to be part of the pain.
Someone was kneeling beside her, speaking to her, but she couldn’t
hear the words.
How had she gotten onto the floor? She
couldn’t remember.
“Fräulein. Fräulein. . .” It was the guard,
the one who had brought her supper. The voice faded away sometimes.
He tried to roll her over onto her back, but she clutched at her
legs, keeping herself wrapped up in a ball. Each time he touched
her she thought she would die of the pain.
Finally the door closed again. She was alone
for a long time in the cool darkness. As long as she was alone she
found she could just bear it.
It was only then, as she lay on the cold
cement floor—she wished the cold would go right through her; she
wanted it to turn her to ice—that she remembered the capsule. They
were killing her, and she had helped them. She would be dead now,
just like General von Goltz, and it was all right because she had
lived a pointless, worthless life. She should have died at Chelmno,
to be turned into ashes that could shame no one. She had been dead
since that day when she had lifted her eyes and smiled at the
German officer, hoping he would save her. She hoped it really was
the Jews who were killing her now. They had a right to their
revenge. The bodies, stacked so neatly at Waldenburg. . .
Slowly, gradually, she began to straighten
her legs. If she took her time, the pain wasn’t too bad. It wasn’t
any worse when she lay on her back, if she kept her knees up. Her
belly felt tight and angry and she held it gently between her
hands, pushing in at the sides.
And then it went through her again, the
stabbing pain. She held her breath, waiting for it to pass off,
fighting hard not to scream again. She felt sick with pain—oh. God,
if she became sick; she felt it would split her apart.
When the door opened again, Esther put her
hand over her eyes to keep out the light. She heard voices—there
were two of them now.
The nurse—yes, the nurse. She could tell from
the smell of carbolic soap. She had heard terrible things about the
nurse. Hard, blunt fingers probed at her belly and now she couldn’t
help herself, but her voice was only a thin wail.
Everything that happened after that was
vague, shadowy, like the flicker of pale light. People took her by
the arms and legs and lifted her up, but they weren’t real people.
Only pain was real and it filled her, as if her skin were only a
membrane to hold it. Once she opened her eyes and saw
Filatov—always Filatov, even now he wouldn’t leave her be—his face
only a few inches from her own. He looked demonic, like a monster
in a dream, as if even now he would have liked to. . . As if he
enjoyed this, even more.
And then everything was quiet. She was lying
on a stretcher and they were outside—she could feel the cold night
air, a little trembling breeze against her bare arms. She felt
better. She couldn’t move, but the pain was almost gone and there
was only a terrible weakness. They were on a loading dock, people
were standing around, the nurse and Filatov and another guard, as
if they were waiting for something.
Filatov and the other guard were speaking in
low voices. She couldn’t understand what they were saying; she only
knew a little prison Russian. Filatov nodded. The thing seemed to
be settled.
Was she going to be all right now? As if the
same question had occurred to her, the nurse came over, slipped a
hand under the blanket, and pressed her fingers against Esther’s
belly, just a little below and to one side of the navel.
God, there it was again! She couldn’t scream.
She tried, but she could only cough. And the coughing made it
worse, like fingers, like the nurse’s thick fingers, tearing her
open to see what was inside.
They left her alone until the ambulance came.
The man who came out through the rear doors was wearing a white
hospital jacket—she was going to the hospital? Yes, of course, why
hadn’t she guessed, except that her mind wouldn’t work beyond the
immediate present. He was very thin, and his wrists came a long way
out of his sleeves. His face looked as if it had been cut from wood
with a sharp knife, all lines and edges. She saw it all,
everything, with astonishing clarity. It all seemed to be happening
to someone else.
The stretcher had short wooden legs. There
was a metal ring bolted to the one nearest Esther’s left foot, and
Filatov was busy threading a chain through it which he cuffed on
her leg just above the ankle. When he had finished, he dropped the
key into his pocket, grinning at her, showing his teeth. You will
find anywhere we take you is a prison, he seemed to be saying, and
I am the guard.
There were negotiations going on, all in
Russian. It seemed that the nurse thought she should come along
too, but she was only a civilian and was therefore in no position
to insist. The man in the white hospital jacket kept shaking his
head, and neither of the guards seemed to care.