Roots of Evil(93)

She studied him for a moment. ‘What a heart-breaker you’re turning into,’ she said unexpectedly. ‘I pity the girls you meet. And don’t grin at me like that, I’m quite well aware of what goes on in the world of teenagers. But I don’t know how much I can tell you about Alraune. Alraune never seemed quite real to me.’

Her eyes had the sad look that Michael hated, and her face, with the framing of white hair, suddenly looked older. Once upon a time her hair had been a deep shiny black, and once upon a time her skin had been smooth and pale, like cream velvet. When she was younger. When she was Lucretia. One day I’ll see if I can find a photo of her as Lucretia, thought Michael. And one day I might be able to find one of the films she made and watch it. Would that be possible? Would she mind?

He said, carefully, ‘Alraune was part of a nightmare – that’s right, isn’t it? You lived inside a nightmare.’

‘That’s sharp of you. Yes, I did.’

‘I know about living nightmares – well, a bit about them.’

‘I know you do. And you shouldn’t have to, not at your age.’

‘It’s all right. I’ve forgotten most of that. So listen, start with the beginning – that was Buchenwald, wasn’t it? – and go on from there. That’s what you always tell me to do with difficult things.’

‘How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is…’ began Alice.

‘…to have a thankless child. Yes, I know. But I’m not thankless.’

‘You’re disgustingly precocious. I’m starting to wonder if I’ve brought you up all wrong.’

‘No, you haven’t.’

‘Well, how many other seventeen-year-olds would quote King Lear? Why aren’t you staying out late and getting illegally drunk and listening to too-loud pop music like the rest of your generation?’ She smiled at him.

‘I don’t know. I don’t care. I do stay out late sometimes, though.’

‘I’m aware of it,’ she said, dryly.

‘Tell me about Buchenwald. Didn’t you try to escape? I would have done.’

‘At first I thought I would,’ said Alice. ‘I even thought it would be easy. All through that train journey I planned what I would do and how I would get away.’

‘To find Conrad and Deborah.’ This was entirely understandable. ‘So there you were on the train trying to plan an escape.’

‘Not just precocious, persistent as well,’ said Alice. ‘But yes, I was on the train, and I thought about escaping all through the hours and hours of jolting and the biting cold, with people being sick on the wooden floors from terror, or relieving their bladders in front of everyone simply because there was nowhere else to do it. Captivity isn’t romantic or noble, Michael, not like it is in stories. It isn’t the Prisoner of Zenda, or the rightful heir to a kingdom being shut in a stone cell by a usurper and then rescued in a swashbuckling fight. The reality’s squalid and horrible and dehumanizing – the Nazis loved the dehumanizing part, of course; it fitted very neatly with their propaganda and their murderous schemes against the Jews. Even so, all through that journey I clung on to how I would find a way to fool them and outwit the SS, and how I would cheat Leo Dreyer and get away—’

‘But you didn’t?’

‘No. There were escapes from the camps, of course, and quite a lot of them were from Buchenwald. Towards the end of the war there was an underground resistance network that smuggled people out. But in those early months it was a very difficult camp to escape from.’

‘What made it so difficult?’

Alice paused, as if arranging the memories in her mind. ‘All the concentration camps were dreadful places,’ she said. ‘You can’t believe how dreadful they were. Most of them were death camps – “Rückkehr unerwünscht” they were labelled. That means, “Return not desired”. Death camps, you see. Buchenwald wasn’t that; but it was “Vernichtung durch arbeit”. Extermination by work.’

Again the pause. Then, ‘Originally it was intended for political prisoners,’ she said. ‘So groups of people were taken into nearby factories or quarries in Weimar and Erfurt, and made to work there, sometimes for twelve hours at a time.’

‘Did you have to do that?’

‘Yes, for a while. I hoped I could escape that way, but the guards were with us all the time, and it was impossible. There were roll calls twice a day – sometimes three times – and the SS patrols were everywhere. Anyone caught trying to escape was shot at once.’ She paused again, and then said, ‘To me – to all of us – Buchenwald was an outpost of hell.’



Once the initial shock and the exhaustion of the gruelling journey had worn off a little, the days inside Buchenwald had begun to blur into a sick bleak misery that seemed to have no end. Alice had found this almost more terrifying than anything she had yet experienced, because once you were caught in it you began to lose count of the days, and you stopped caring which day or which month it was anyway. But earlier on she vowed to keep careful count of the days, and she scratched a rough chart on the edge of her wooden-framed bunk so that she could cross off each day and know how much time had passed.

Some of the women with whom she shared the hut – Hut 24 it had been – believed themselves to have died, and to have gone to hell. This was the real hell of the preachers and the rabbis and the priests, they said with fearful eyes. This was the place where you paid for your sins and who knew how long that might take? Alice thought this a na?ve outlook, but once or twice she found herself wondering whether there was some form of retribution at work. Supposing this is the reckoning, she thought – the payment for those enchanted ten years? For having Conrad and Deborah, and for all the extravagances and the fun and the admiration.