My Name is Eva(51)

‘Gosh, sounds desperate,’ said Sally. ‘Mind you, the things some of these poor beggars have seen, who wouldn’t feel like drinking themselves to death?’

‘But we are here to help them live again,’ Brigitte said. ‘We must try to bring hope, not despair. They’ve had enough of that.’

Then the three girls fell silent and into that silence, the silence that comes when a community, a township, a village, is switching off the lights, blowing out the candles and settling down to sleep, there came the sounds of distant cracks. The girls all looked at each other and gasped, and Eva said, ‘That sounded just like gunfire to me.’





47





Eva, 14 November 1945





When Spring Comes





Eva tidied the pile of forms on her desk and filled her pen with ink in preparation for her first morning of work. She had been assigned to issuing temporary passes for inmates leaving the camp to seek lost family members and much-needed supplies.

Hearing a tap on the door, she turned to see Ken, filling the doorframe with his bulk in his warm charcoal greatcoat.

‘Did you hear anything last night? We all thought we heard gunshots.’

‘No, I didn’t hear a thing. I was sleeping like a baby after that long drive, but it wouldn’t surprise me. It’s probably the Poles handing out justice again,’ he said.

Eva looked surprised. ‘What do you mean, justice?’

Ken laughed. ‘Look, kid, you’re going to see a few rules being bent while you’re here. Things are just about starting to calm down now, but they haven’t yet returned to what you might describe as civilised society.’

Eva paused in the middle of sharpening a batch of pencils. ‘But we’re here to run things properly. There’s paperwork to be done. People can’t just pass judgement themselves, can they?’

‘If they feel they’ve reason enough, they will. Some of these people went to hell and back, and want to make sure the perpetrators get what’s coming to them.’ Ken rolled a cigarette between his fingers and put the skinny roll-up between his lips, while he fumbled in his pockets for a light.

‘You really mean they’re taking revenge? They’re killing people who should be held for questioning and put on trial?’

‘Maybe, we can’t be sure. This is a big place and there’s a lot of forest out there.’

‘But the Allies have agreed. There are processes. There will be more trials like Lünenburg and sentences will be passed if people are found guilty.’ At least I hope there will be after the horrors I witnessed in my previous posting, Eva thought.

‘Sure, kid, we all hope so’ – he shrugged – ‘but in the meantime, there’s still a lot of people running around without the right papers, a lot of people with hazy, incomplete stories of where they’ve been and what they did, and some of them are the good guys and some of them are the baddies. It’s just like the Wild West out there, kid.’

‘You mean they’re taking the law into their own hands, don’t you? Handing out rough justice.’

‘Sort of. Official justice takes time, the machinery has to be set in motion. And some of these fellas are going to make damn sure they disappear while that’s happening, so maybe some of the Poles want to get on with the job and make sure the buggers get what’s coming to them. The way it works is like this, someone gets wind of a kapo who beat the shit out of the poor bastards in the camps, someone else finds an eyewitness and next thing you know’ – he shaped his fingers into a pistol gesture – ‘pow, pow! Kapo kaput, job done.’

Eva was aghast, picturing an execution in the snowdrifts the previous night, then said, ‘And we can’t do anything to stop it?’

‘Easier not to, I’d say. It’s going to keep happening, no matter what we try and do. And it could be far worse. I met some Americans not long ago and they said in the early days they handed some of the low-ranking SS over to their former prisoners for them to execute. And of course, it could get very nasty now and again. Sometimes they did the business quick and easy, sometimes they took their time about it. The Americans once saw some revenge-crazed Poles out of the camps beat an SS man senseless, then feed him into the crematorium. They strapped him down, slid him in the oven, turned on the heat and pushed him in and out until he’d been burned alive.’ He finished his thin cigarette and pulled at the wisp of paper stuck to his lip.

‘That’s absolutely horrific.’ Eva shuddered. ‘But they can’t do anything like that here, can they?’

‘No, thank goodness. The bread ovens are too busy feeding everyone.’ He laughed at his joke. ‘So, let’s be grateful we only hear the occasional shot, clean and simple.’

Eva glanced again at her neat piles of paper, her ranks of pens and pencils, and said, ‘I must be stupid. I hadn’t really thought it through.’ Is that what I should have done? Rough justice?

He shook his head. ‘You’re not the only one, kid. We’re only picking up the pieces. We can’t really know what it was like for them in those hellholes.’

‘I’ve been trying to tell myself that. I want to know and yet I don’t – I just want to help people get back to some kind of normal life.’