Roots of Evil(81)

It was a long, jolting, sick-making ride. The carriages were sparse and uncomfortable; some were roofless, little better than cattle trucks, and the prisoners were packed in haphazardly, forty and fifty to a coach.

Alice still had on the clothes she had been wearing when Leo Dreyer found her – the long dark raincoat and the plain dark skirt and jumper which she had hoped would render her unnoticeable – but many of the other prisoners had on loose shirt-like garments with the yellow Star of David either sewn or painted on the fronts. She had no idea if this was intended as a brand or simply as some kind of identification, because the prisoners all seemed to wear it in numb obedience. Some of the women were crying in a miserable, beaten way, but most of them seemed sunk in a dreadful patient acceptance. Most of them had lost their homes to the Nazis in what Alice had already heard called Kristallnacht – the Night of Broken Glass, named from the smashing of glass fronts of so many hundreds of Jewish shops. A great many of them had lost their families as well. The few women present held on to their children with frightened desperation, but other than that they seemed to be beyond caring what came next, and they did what they were told by the armed SS guards, cringing if the machine-guns were raised threateningly.

Had Conrad been treated like this? Forced to wear the yellow insignia, beaten into this shambling, cringing servility? Agony squeezed round Alice’s heart at the thought of it.

Somewhere during the nightmare train journey all the colour and all the light seemed to drain from the world. I’m back in one of my own films, Alice thought, drifting in and out of an uneasy half-slumber, occasionally waking to massage her cramped limbs. Everything’s gradually becoming black and gloomy and filled with shadows. And there certainly isn’t going to be a romantic rescue in the final frame, in fact I’m not at all sure if there’s even going to be a final frame. No, I won’t think that. There’ll be a way to escape. Perhaps when we get into a station…? Yes, I’ll wait until then.

But when they reached Buchenwald’s small railway station the Schutzstaffeln were everywhere, and almost all of them were armed with sub-machine-guns, so that only a lunatic would have tried to run away.

The exhausted prisoners were tumbled out of the hot, evil-smelling carriages, and into the waiting lorries. As they drove through the town a heavy dusk was starting to close down, but it was possible to see that Buchenwald was, as Leo Dreyer had so tauntingly said, a picturesque little place, with little doll’s houses for the people to live in, and a minuscule church and an inn.

Wood-carving and violin-making, thought Alice. Wine festivals and toy-making and miniature castles overlooking the rivers. Yes, there was Ettersburg Castle on a ridge of the hillside, with its pepperpot turrets and toy drawbridge. This was a place where you might come for a holiday, just as Goethe had done, and just as Liszt and Schiller had done. You would enjoy the quaintness and the fairytale atmosphere of the place, and if you were so minded you might write your music or pen your luminous essays. But most fairytales had a dark side, and now that they had driven out of the little town, the road was already starting to feel lonely and sinister. Like the feeling you got in a dream where safe, familiar things became suddenly imbued with menace, so that the dream slid down into a nightmare.

It was dark inside the truck, but she could see that they had left the town and that the road was fringed with the characteristic pine trees. Was it dark enough to jump from the back of the truck and trust to luck that she could reach the forest’s shelter before the soldiers opened fire on her? She was just trying to decide this when the truck rumbled around a curve in the road, and there ahead of them were immense iron gates – massive heavy structures, like the gates guarding a giant’s castle.

Konzentrationslager Buchenwald. The darkness at the heart of the nightmare.



At the sight of it the men and women in the lorry drew instinctively closer to one another for comfort, and even from the lorry, Alice could see the high fences surrounding the entire compound, with, beyond them, serried rows of barrack-like buildings. Guard towers jutted up from the fences at intervals, with massive black-snouted machine-guns mounted in each one. A terrible bleak loneliness closed around her. No one knows where I am. Conrad doesn’t know, and Deborah doesn’t know. There’s absolutely no means of anyone reaching me here.

The gates swung slowly and silently open, as if some invisible machinery were being operated, and the lorries drove through. Alice glanced back and saw the gates close. Shutting her into the nightmare.





CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR




Lucy had almost finished the horror-film presentation for the satellite TV companies, and she was quite pleased with it. Her idea of setting it all in a tongue-in-cheek horror framework seemed to have worked quite well. Quondam’s technical department had dubbed part of Tartini’s The Devil’s Trill to use as background for The Devil’s Sonata, and although there had been a bit of a royalties tussle with the record company who had included it in a recent compilation of semi-and quasi-religious string music, Lucy thought the tussle had been worth it because the music gave terrific atmosphere to the film.

She was putting together a final set of visual and audio effects – she had unearthed some beautifully menacing out-takes from an ancient Tod Slaughter version of Dracula, which could be blown up and possibly tinted with suitably blood-hued crimson or even back-projected on to a screen – and she had spent two hilarious afternoons in the sound department, helping them to fake creepy footsteps and creaking doors.