Roots of Evil(97)

‘When it came to it, they were easily deceived,’ Alice said. ‘I enlisted two or three of the other women – people I could trust – and between us we concocted various stories that we thought the Nazis would swallow. The discovery of a planned break-out from one hut or another. False papers being prepared somewhere else. At careful intervals I carried these stories to the commandant, and he believed them. He was a stupid man, Karl Koch. Much of the time he was drunk or gambling, so that made him easy to hoodwink.’

‘Didn’t he find out you were feeding him false information?’

‘Not for a long time. We were very careful not to put anyone in danger with the information we gave him, but we managed to keep attention away from the real plotters.’

‘Tell me about the real plotters.’ Again, Alice had evoked the people of the stories, so that it was easy to see the little groups of ragged women huddling together in wooden huts, planning and whispering, their thin faces intent and serious.

‘They were the ones who really were getting people out to freedom. It was all kept very simple though – mostly prisoners being smuggled out in laundry baskets or disguised as workmen. We didn’t build aeroplanes out of matchsticks like the officers in Colditz Castle, or dig tunnels under stoves or dress up as German officers. And not all of the ones who escaped from Buchenwald made it to safety. But some did. Some reached Switzerland or England. Our successes were pitifully few, but the fact that we had successes at all gave us hope. They gave us something to work for.’

‘Why didn’t you go with them, those people who escaped?’

She took a moment to reply to this. ‘Karl Koch and his men watched me,’ she said. ‘So did the higher-ranking Nazi officials who visited Buchenwald. They used to question me very closely. And twice while I was there Hermann G?ering came, although I did not speak to him. But he knew about me – he knew I had been enlisted as a spy. And so I had to play the part of a greedy selfish little gold-digger. As far as the Nazis were concerned, I was Lucretia, you see. Someone prepared to sell her companions for the sake of food and clothes. Once, I remember, I had dinner in the commandant’s rooms with Karl Koch and two of Hitler’s chief of staff.’ She grinned and the mischievous baroness was suddenly and vividly there in the room. ‘For all their posturing and pretence at style and at being part of la belle époque, the wine was dreadful and the food mediocre. And the company was boring. I remember von Ribbentrop was there that night.’

‘I know about him. He killed himself rather than be executed after the war.’

‘He did. He was an unpleasant little weasel,’ said Alice. ‘Nothing more than a jumped-up wine salesman.’ For a moment the baroness’s arrogance surfaced. ‘But I pretended to relish it. I was such a hypocrite, Michael, you can’t imagine what a hypocrite I was. But I gave the performances of my life inside Buchenwald and it worked. The Nazis were so delighted with their scheme to use prisoners as spies in return for better conditions – there was even a suggestion that Hitler knew and approved the arrangement, and the SS officers would have climbed mountains and swum oceans to get Hitler’s approval. But that meant they all kept very firm tabs on me.’

‘Did you get the better food and all the other things?’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Yes, there were improvements. And I was permitted to send a letter to my parents in England, and later on to receive two letters from them. That at least gave me news of Deborah, who was living with them by that time – they had taken her and the nurse in, of course, as I had known they would.’

Michael said, ‘But in the end the Nazis found out that you were cheating them? That you weren’t really spying at all?’

Alice paused for so long that Michael thought she was not going to answer. But finally she said, ‘Yes, they found out. And they sent me to another camp.’

‘As a punishment?’

‘Yes. The camp was in a little Polish town in the middle of swamplands. It had originally been a barrack and there was some kind of abandoned factory there as well, but when I was taken there it had just been enlarged and part of the swamps had been drained. But it was still surrounded by huge stagnant ponds, and it was like a stark lonely world, forgotten by the rest of mankind. It stank of human misery.’ She looked across at him. ‘It was known as Auschwitz,’ she said.

Auschwitz…The name hung on the air between them, and Michael felt an icy shiver on the back of his neck. Auschwitz was the deep dark core of all the evil, he knew that, and his mother had known it as well. ‘A bad place,’ she had said, her eyes unreadable. But when the much-smaller Michael had pressed for stories about this place, she had shaken her head and refused to talk of it. ‘It isn’t a place to make stories about,’ she had said. ‘It’s one of the world’s dark places, and I don’t want you to ever know about that kind of darkness, Michael, darling. You and I will only ever make up stories about happy things.’

But the seventeen-year-old Michael knew that Auschwitz was the iron prison of all the nightmares, hemmed in by swamps, surrounded by spiked fences that would tear spitefully into people’s flesh if they tried to get out. And once upon a time inside that iron prison…

He took a deep breath, and said, ‘Is it true that Alraune was born inside Auschwitz?’

This time the silence seemed to descend on them like a thick stifling curtain, and with it came a feeling that somewhere beyond the warm safe house something might be listening, and biding its time…