Deadlight-Hall(50)

After Mildred’s death, there was a note for Leo which the solicitor handed to him.

‘I can’t leave Willow Bank Farm to you, Leo,’ she had written. ‘I should like to, but there are cousins who have a legal claim and there’s nothing I can do about it.’ Reading that, Leo had supposed there was some kind of entail. He had never expected to be left the farm, anyway. But Mildred Hurst had left him a fair sum of money. ‘The life savings of my brother and myself,’ the note said. ‘Dear Leo, you were the son I never had.’

Leo had cried over that, quietly and genuinely. He wished he had known what she meant to do, because he could have told her how very grateful he was, not specifically for the money, but for the home she and her brother had given him.

The vicar’s sister had been right in saying nobody would want Deadlight Hall. It had crouched on its patch of scrubby land, quietly decaying, its windows falling in, its stonework gradually covered by creeping moss and lichen. Sometimes Leo had frightening dreams about the misshapen shadow who had walked the dark corridors, and the voice calling for the children. After a while the dreams became less frequent, but they never quite went away.

He never forgot Deadlight Hall. Of course he did not – it was not the kind of place anyone could forget. It was reassuring, though, to remember that it was still standing empty. No one will ever live there, he had thought. It will fall down of its own accord in the end, and the shadow and whatever was in that furnace room will go.

But if he was able to push Deadlight Hall into the corners of his mind, he was never able to do the same thing with Sophie and Susannah. Just as Deadlight Hall was not the kind of place to forget, Sophie and Susannah were not the kind of people to forget, either.

As the years slid past he gradually accepted it was unlikely he would ever find out what had happened to them.

London

1944

Dear J.W.

Later today I shall try to get on a train for the journey home, although it is not easy to do so, and I may have to make several attempts. All the trains are constantly crowded with service men and women, some wounded, others who are joining or rejoining their regiments. So although I hope to be home in the next few days, it could be longer.

Yesterday I heard from Sch?nbrunn – a letter sent from the very lip of Auschwitz itself. I cannot begin to imagine how he was able to get a letter out from there, but it should not surprise me that his remarkable network stretches even to the town of Oswiecim. He has never talked much about that network, but from time to time I have had glimpses of it – of people with whom a letter or a message can be left … A small shop in an unobtrusive side street where the shopkeeper can be trusted … Stone bridges spanning narrow rivers where there are cavities within the stones, allowing messages to be left for collection …

At times I almost wonder if Sch?nbrunn is real, for he seems to inhabit the pages of an adventure story or some strange and vivid fantasy. There have been occasions in his company when I have remembered the old legends, and in particular that of the Golem of Prague – the real one, that is, not the two that Leo and the Reiss twins had. You know the old tale, of course – indeed, it is part of our heritage. How that Golem was constructed of clay, and brought to life to defend the Prague ghetto How, later, it was entombed in a hiding place in the Old New Synagogue, and how, when the tomb-like hiding place was broken open at the end of the nineteenth century, no trace of it was found. And how it is prophesied that the golem will be restored to life again if it is ever needed to protect our people.

I have reread those last two sentences, and I wonder, as I have often wondered, how people can say there are no links between the great religions of the world.

I dare say you are smiling as you read all this, and saying, ‘Oy, that Maurice Bensimon, he is such a dream-spinner.’ If ever I were to write my memoirs, the dreams I would spin of these years would be dark ones. So on consideration, I shall never do so. I will only say, instead, that whatever Sch?nbrunn is, or is not, he has the most extraordinary strength of mind and will of any man I have ever met, and his courage is humbling.

It seems too much of a risk to entrust his actual letter to the post, so instead I am copying down the main information here for you. Performing such a mundane task will help to calm my mind and will fill up the hours until I can be on my way to Waterloo Station.

Sch?nbrunn writes:

‘One of the curious things about this place is that when the word Auschwitz is uttered, one simply thinks of the camp itself – the grim grey barracks inside the barbed-wire, as if it is a desolate and solitary entity set amidst a wilderness. But although wilderness there is, the old town of Oswiecim is quite nearby, and people still live in it. I will not say they live in normality, but they pursue their lives as well as they can.