Deadlight-Hall(51)

‘The Germans have drained the swamps that once lay everywhere, but traces of the dank, misty bogland still linger, and it is as if a dark miasma hangs over the old town – as if the misery and the fear has seeped outwards from the camp itself.

‘Since the occupation, the population has dwindled to a sad fragment. A great many people have been driven from their homes, and numerous small villages have been wiped from the map entirely. It saddens and angers me to think of those lost villages – their histories vanished, their stories and their people wiped from the landscape for ever.

‘In happier circumstances I would have wanted to delve into Oswiecim’s history, but I shall not do so. I want no memories of this place to lodge in my mind.

‘Part of me is praying Sophie and Susannah Reiss will not be here – that this will prove to be a false lead. But there is another part that hopes they are here, because that will mean I can take action to rescue them. But if Mengele does have them I cannot bear to contemplate what may be happening to them.

‘I beg you, do not let the Reiss family know any of this.’

Sch?nbrunn then went on to write that he had found lodgings in the town.

‘They are not good, but I have stayed in worse. My landlady is a lugubrious but kindly soul, and this morning she told me how everyone in the area knows what goes on inside the camp.

‘“They think they keep the secrets of what they do in there,” she said, “but we all know that exterminations go on all the time. And there are the experiments, also – performed by the one they call the Angel of Death.”

‘My mind sprang to attention at this, but as if I had never heard the name – as if it is not burned into my brain – I only said, “Who is the Angel of Death?”

‘“He works on the children,” she said. “Terrible things, they say he does. He is not always there – he has other places he visits and where he works. But I have seen him walk around occasionally. He looks for the children – it’s said he always has sweets in his pockets for them. He talks to them and listens to their tales.” A pause. “And then he carries them off to his laboratories,” she said.

‘“What happens to them there?”

‘“No one knows. But few of those children are ever seen again.”

‘“You know that for certain?”

‘“No. I know the other deaths are for certain, though. When the wind is in the right direction the stench comes into the town. It cannot be mistaken – it is from the continuous burning of the bodies,” she said. “Thick, sweet, mixed with the acrid stench of the heat. You taste it in your nose for days. You would like coffee now?”

‘The coffee is terrible, gritty and sour, but today I drank it thankfully, hoping it might wash away her words. It did not, of course.

‘Oh, M.B., one day this may all be part of the past and they may build monuments and memorials to the people slaughtered here, but nothing anyone can ever do will succeed in wiping from my mind the things I am seeing – the hopelessness and the fear in the faces of the people being herded along the railway tracks towards the camp. Those images have seared into my mind like acid, and they will always be black and grey and drenched in despair, threaded with spider webs of railway lines that all lead to one place. There will be no colour in my memories of Auschwitz.

‘Please remember that if you do not hear from me again, you should not assume I have failed.’

The letter ended on this half-optimistic, half-warning note. But despite the optimism I fear we shall not hear from him again – not ever. This morning came a visit from one of the miscellany of people who make up that secret network. How the man had tracked me down in this modest boarding house on London’s outskirts – how he even knew of my existence – I have no idea. But he did find me somehow.

‘I believe we have lost him this time,’ he said, facing me in the dingy guests’ lounge, sipping tea (we cannot get coffee at the moment).

My heart did not sink at his words; it seemed to constrict as if iron bands had clamped around it.

I said, ‘He’s indestructible.’

‘Not this time.’ He looked at me very levelly. He has that direct look Sch?nbrunn’s people almost always have. ‘I saw him for myself. I saw him go towards those gates—’

‘Auschwitz?’

‘Yes. I was waiting for him in hiding – there is not much hiding, but Sch?nbrunn found a place. But I was close enough to even read the legend above the gates. Arbeit Macht Frei.’