Gypsies, Tramps, and Thieves(81)
Shouldering his Mauser’s rifle strap, he swung down from the van. He figured he had fifteen minutes at the most before the van Giorgio had hotwired would go missing from the mortuary in town.
Romy’s outlandish grin and brazenly sassy responses had bedazzled the whey faced guard at Sachsenhausen’s main gatehouse, Guard Tower A. Flummoxed and about to go off duty, he had airily waved on past the van, purportedly there to recover the remains of a dissected corpse and transfer it to the town mortuary, where it would be incinerated.
At the experiment lab, a camp doctor, Doktor Pfister, per the badge on his white lab coat, looked startled. Middle-aged with the face of a fair-haired angel, his Aryan-blue eyes hooded. “We did not schedule a pickup for this morning. Afternoons only.”
“Hmm.” Gideon rubbed the back of his neck. “It seems there has been a mistake.”
Back in the van, he said, “One obstacle down, Romy, five-thousand seven-hundred-and-twenty-three more to overcome.”
Dawn’s feeble autumn light was just breaking, and fog off the river spread cold tentacles across the thousand-acre concentration camp. Romy shifted into forward gear, jolting the van’s chassis, and rattled off in fits and starts toward the large Appellplatz, the roll call area at the base of Sachsenhausen’s triangular shape.
Here, over eight-thousand prisoners were lined up in rows of ten. Most of them, his people. How much intellectual power, linguistic brilliance, and human diversity was being lost through the Nazi’s racial, biological refinement? A volcanic rage erupted in himself – and was directed at himself for his egocentricity in turning a blind eye and a deafened ear.
If it did not threaten him then it did not have to do with him.
Under control of the SS guards, the kapos were counting the prisoners and barking orders. A mistake during the counting meant everything must start again and, according to Romy, could occasionally take hours. There could be no miscounting this morning.
He climbed down from the van, his hand loath to release its hold on the open door. The van, idling within sight of the Appellplatz, would be a target for inquiry.
But, then, so would he be, as he insinuated himself among the guards, assembling to march eight-hundred or so of Sachsenhausen’s prisoners to the Klinkerswerks docks and its brick foundry in the next three minutes – if everything played out as timed.
“Look, Romy, you can still drive on, drive out of Sachsenhausen and ditch the truck. I can handle the –”
“This truck is going nowhere without yuirself and Luca.”
He could only nod. His sweaty hand went to close the door, and she called in that soft brogue of hers, “May ye be lucky, Gideon Goldman.”
Per Irina’s intelligence, Luca was to be found somewhere between the fifty-third and sixty-fifth row of prisoners bound for the brick foundry. However, the ubiquitous striped uniforms made identification exceedingly difficult.
“Look for meself,” Romy had told him with that gap-toothed grin that used to drive him nuts and that now he found ridiculously enchanting. “Only, me twin’s hair is shorter and his body taller.”
Torturously searching among the eleven designated rows, Gideon noted, first the black triangular armband that identified Luca as a professional criminal, with the Z, denoting a Romani, a Gypsy.
Actually, Luca’s body was not only taller but, also, thinner. Skeletal thin. And with sunken cheeks and hollow eyes. However, he had Romy’s distinctly fey features. Harsher features, maybe, but her fire and vitality was steamrolled in his by hardship and suffering,
Beyond the camp, McClellan, along with Giorgio now, was standing a barge down river a mile, not far from other barges readying to unload stones at the docks. Familiar with boats as McClellan claimed to be, after studying the map, he insisted that the best escape route was via the Havel – that there was less traffic on the river and less chance of being stopped between the docks and the Berlin suburb of Spandau.
Gideon knew fully well Romy’s heart was bound in some inextricable way with a man so unlike her and, yet, perhaps, the key to her lock and the missing piece to her puzzle.
However, Gideon had never been a man to give up. Even if this present deed of courtly chivalry was one of epic stupidity on his part. In his life’s short experience, love either prevailed or it withered. He meant to prevail.
The tightly coordinated effort was underway, although Romy’s brother had no forewarning that either freedom or death awaited him in the next twelve three or so minutes.
Now that roll call had finished, Gideon joined with the dozens of other SS soldiers, assembling to escort the segregated prisoners from the concentration camp to the docks. One guard was assigned for every ten prisoners on that shift, meaning, if plans went awry, approximately eighty guards would be shooting at him and Luca.
Romy’s brother was the second from the end of a line of emaciated prisoners moving past Gideon with dragging steps. Sidling up to the line, he sotto-voiced, “Romy sent me.”
Luca’s head swiveled toward him. Clearly, the use of his twin’s name catapulted him from the physiological and psychological stupor that possessed the assembled prisoners. Next to him, the first man at that end of the line was in too deep a fugue to even take note.
Gideon kept his eyes straight ahead, but his peripheral gaze was acutely aware of everything, every single trampled blade in the Appellplatz, the glint of the soldier’s Mauser off to his right, the dullness of the prisoner’s face immediately to his left. “When I tell you, Luca, make a run for the main gate.”