A Murder in Auschwitz (29 page)

Meyer was intrigued. Something about the Pfeiffer case? Something he had missed. It was an incentive, but he was going to stick to his original request. “That does sound interesting,” Meyer admitted. “But I need more than the word of an SS officer imprisoned in his own cell. I need the Commandant to agree. I will take his word, not yours.”

Kolb felt his rage rising again. “Obersturmbannfuhrer Liebehenschel won’t give his word to a Jew. He wouldn’t lower himself to even speak to one, never mind make one of you a promise.”

Meyer shrugged. “It is up to you, Herr Kolb. As interesting as your proposition is, unless I see my children and my wife, then you will be joining me in a death sentence.”

Kolb knew that he had been outmanoeuvred by Meyer. He should not have expected anything less; after all, this was the man who would hopefully be able to save him from the firing squad. Meyer may only be a Jew, but he was a master craftsman when it came to negotiations.

“I would need to check with the Camp Commandant to see if that would be possible.”

Berlin, 3rd May 1939

KLARA laughed as Meyer spilled a spoonful of soup down his tie. “You would think that the mouth of someone who talks for a living would be so big that they couldn’t miss it with a spade, never mind a spoon.”

Anna and Greta joined in the laughter. “Oh dear, Papa, are you going to suck the soup off your tie?” joked Greta.

Meyer held his tie tight and scooped what he could back onto his spoon. “For goodness sake,” he laughed. “Who would have thought eating soup would be so difficult?”

This was Meyer’s favourite time of the day. It was when the four of them could sit safely in their home and chat about what the girls learned today in Mama’s school and what Meyer had been doing at work.

Bauer had insisted that Meyer stay employed with Bauer & Bauer, although, because of the racial laws, he had been forced to stop leading cases. Instead, he now supported Otto Weber. Not in court, as this would have constituted him practising as a lawyer, as did any research which required the visiting of prison facilities or police stations. However, he did provide invaluable research from the company library, and his unique insight into the progression of events in a case meant that he could give Weber and some of the other lawyers help he never could have when he too had been a lawyer.

Yet Meyer missed the courtroom. He missed the silence that preceded the start of the day’s proceedings. He missed the verbal jousting with the prosecution. And he missed Deschler.

It had been several months since Meyer had last seen him. Every now and then, Deschler would appear, unannounced, at the Bauer & Bauer offices and would always seek Meyer out first, before taking him up to sit in Friedrich Bauer’s office to chat and drink coffee.

Often, Meyer wished that a stenographer had been present to record the exchanges of three lawyers sparring and attempting to extract information from one another. These were always moments of pure joy.

Deschler still worked for the Reich Ministry of Justice, but he was always evasive when either Bauer or Meyer had tried to tie him down about what his role now was. Whatever it was required him to now carry a firearm, something Meyer had only noticed during his last visit, when Deschler had dropped his cigarette lighter. Meyer had bent down to retrieve it for him and spotted a shoulder holster hidden inside his jacket. Meyer had also noticed that a car waited for him outside the office, no matter how long he took.

Meyer took off his soup-stained tie and hung it over the back of his chair. He would give it a rinse after dinner.

“It’s not a tie you need, darling,” said Klara, “it’s a bib.” This caused further laughter from the girls and Klara.

“Goodness me, you are all easily amused,” joked Meyer, when there was a knock at the apartment door.

Meyer and Klara looked at each other. They rarely had anyone visit them these days. Frau Fischer, who had known them for such a long time, refused to acknowledge their existence, which confused and upset the children. A knock at the door always caused them both a feeling of unease. Meyer got up from the table and answered the door.

Outside stood a man around Meyer’s age, with a tanned face and salty blonde hair.

“Hello, am I at the residence of Klara Steinmann?” he asked.

“Well, she is now Klara Meyer, but yes, Steinmann was her maiden name,” replied Meyer. “How can I help you?”

“Ah, yes. My apologies, I knew her brother, Karl Steinmann,” he said. “I was in Spain.”

Karl had left Germany to join the International Brigades at the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. Klara had begged him not to go. She had been unable to understand how a war in Spain had anything to do with Germany; no matter how much Karl had tried to explain that this was a war worth fighting in, a war which could change the world, a fight between a militaristic fascist organisation and a peaceful socialist state. He had had to go. It was his duty.

Klara had reminded him how he had been when he had returned from the trenches of the Western Front. How he had not slept for over a year without waking up screaming from the nightmares. But Karl had said this was different. Things had changed. War was no longer about borders and land but about thoughts and minds.

In the end, there was nothing that Klara could say or do to change his mind, and Karl had left in the Autumn of 1937. Klara had received a few letters from him, from Madrid, from Barcelona, and from other places she had never heard of. He always said in them that she should not write back as he would never know where he was going to be and the postal service was intermittent to say the least. And then the letters had stopped.

The feeling of dread that Meyer had had before answering the door now turned into the unwelcome sensation of nausea.

“Who is it, Manfred?” came a shout from Klara.

Meyer stared at the visitor. “It’s someone who knew Karl,” he shouted back. Then he added, “In Spain.” Klara appeared at his shoulder.

“Klara Steinmann, sorry, Meyer?” asked the man. He wore a brown, ill-fitting suit and held a trilby hat in his hands.

“Yes,” she said, in what was no more than a whisper.

“My name is Herman Brandt. I knew your brother.”

Meyer put his arm around his wife. “You had better come in.”

Klara led Brandt into the livingroom, while Meyer returned to the kitchen to tell the girls that they had a visitor and that he and their mother needed some time together. They were to finish their soup then go and play in their bedroom. The girls nodded, understanding that something important was happening in the next room.

When Meyer returned to the living room, both Klara and Brandt were seated facing each other.

“Herr Brandt was telling me that he has just returned from Spain, Manfred. He just arrived back in Berlin yesterday,” said Klara.

“Can I offer you a coffee?” asked Meyer.

“No thank you, Herr Meyer. I won’t take up too much of your time,” replied Brandt.

Meyer sat next to Klara on their sofa and placed his hand on her knee. She held on to his arm and he could feel her lean against him.

Brandt played nervously with his hat. “As I said, I knew Kurt in Spain and I was there when he died. I’m sorry.”

Klara brought a hand up to her mouth. She had known in her heart of hearts when the letters had stopped that something had happened. She had hoped that Karl had perhaps been wounded, or taken prisoner, but when the letters never came again, slowly, she allowed herself to give up hope of seeing him again. But now, to be told definitively that he was gone for good, made the pain return.

“I was not sure if you knew,” said Brandt. “I knew he wrote to you. He spoke of you and your husband often. When he died, I didn’t know how to let you know. I supposed that you might have guessed when the letters stopped. Perhaps I shouldn’t have come.”

Klara took out a handkerchief and attempted to dry away the tears which stained her face. “Please, Herr Brandt. You are right; I had guessed that the worst had befallen my brother.”

Brandt sighed and stared into his empty hat. “I promised myself that I would come and see you on my return to Germany. Karl spoke of how you disapproved of his fighting in Spain, that you didn’t understand his reasons for being there. I wanted to come and tell you that although you may never agree with why he went, or what he was doing there, I wanted you to know that when he died, he laid down his life so that others may live.

“It is easy to see the war in Spain as an adventure, to see the foreign fighters there as nothing more than sentimental mercenaries. I am sure there is nothing I will be able to tell you today to change your mind on that. But although Karl went to Spain to fight the fascists, to be a soldier of conscience, that was not how he died. He didn’t die on some Spanish hillside in a useless attack on a Nationalist village, or on some Catalonian road, bombed by the Condor Legion. Karl died a hero, someone that will be remembered by those that he saved that day and their families, probably for generations to come.”

Brandt stood and nervously checked that the buttons on his overly large jacket were still in place. “I realise that this is a difficult time for you. I know that perhaps you may not wish to hear the details of how your brother died, so I will leave you for the moment. I will only be in Berlin for a few days; the regime in Germany is somewhat hostile to my political views, so I will be leaving for a more liberal-minded country. I am staying at this address,” he said, handing over a card. “I will be there tomorrow, between three and six. If you want me to explain further about your brother’s time in Spain, then please come and visit me. If not, please remember, your brother died so that others could live, not for some abstract political reason.”

Meyer thanked Brandt and followed him to the door. “Herr Brandt, thank you for coming. I will speak with Klara and see how she feels. It may be that I will come and visit you myself if she doesn’t feel she is capable.”

Brandt nodded, thanked Meyer, and headed down the apartment block stairway. As Meyer was closing the door, he noticed that Frau Fischer’s door was slightly ajar. He stood and watched as her door slowly closed.

After Brandt had left the previous night, Klara’s mood had lifted, and she had seemed surprisingly high-spirited. Meyer had been worried that it was a form of shock that she was exhibiting, and when he had questioned her several times about how she was feeling, she took him by the hand and sat him on the sofa.

“It may seem strange, Manfred,” she had said. “But now I know for sure, it is more of a relief. I mourned for Karl a long time ago, and although those feelings of loss returned when Herr Brandt confirmed that Karl had died, I can now lay those feelings to rest.” Once she had explained how she felt, Meyer agreed to take her to see Brandt at the guesthouse.

It was four o’clock exactly. Meyer and Klara sat on the bed in Brandt’s small room as he boiled water for coffee on a tiny, single gas ringed stove.

“Believe me, this is luxury,” he laughed. “Up until a few days ago, if I wanted a hot drink I had to build a fire, find water, hang a pot over it, boil the water, and find coffee or tea from somewhere. And there was rarely milk, hardly ever cream, and never sugar.”

Once Brandt had managed to fill three mismatched and cracked mugs with hot coffee, he sat on a wooden folding chair, the only chair in the room. “Frau Meyer, please, if at any point you wish me to stop, please tell me. I do understand how difficult this must be.”

“Thank you, Herr Brandt,” she replied. “But I need to know how he died. I realised last night that I really had known that he was gone a while ago, but what I need to know is how it happened and where he is now.”

Brandt nodded and stared into his coffee. “First of all, Frau Meyer, you can rest assured that he lies in a proper grave with a headstone in a village just outside Barcelona, called Olesa de Bonesvalls.”

Klara sipped her coffee. It was a relief to know that her brother was buried in a proper grave. She felt that at the end of one’s life there should always be a grave. Somewhere for your bones to rest, somewhere for family to visit, somewhere to be remembered. She hoped that one day, she and Manfred would visit Spain and Olesa de Bonesvalls and lay some flowers for her brother.

“I suppose it would be best if I started at the beginning,” said Brandt, cupping his hot mug. “It was during the summer of nineteen-thirty-eight, and our unit, part of the Thalmann Battalion, was in the hills around Barcelona on patrol, looking out for any Nationalist insurgents.

“It was late afternoon, and we stopped at Olesa de Bonesvalls to replenish our water and pitch for the night. We relied heavily on the local population to provide us with food and water when on patrol, as we would be in the hills for days and we just couldn’t carry enough to keep us going. Sometimes, when we were in the forest, we could shoot pigeon or squirrel or, once, when we were really lucky, a wild boar,” said Brandt shaking his head and smiling. “Someone produced a couple of bottles of wine that day, and one of our unit had been a chef in Austria before coming to Spain. He used some wild herbs and the hard cheese that we all carried and cooked it all over a fire. It was the greatest feast I have ever had.” Brandt took another drink of his coffee, washing away the memory of the wild boar.