Eva (35 page)

A faded sign on an old red-brick building proclaimed:

RADEMACHER & SOHN

SEILEREI

Gegründet  1888

“We were shut down during the last year of the war,” Ludwig explained as they walked down the narrow ropewalk past the massive rope-making machinery. Willi looked around in awe. The building must be at least 250 meters long, he thought.

“We make primarily rope and binder twine here,” Ludwig told them. “But we could not get any hard fiber cordage. We had to close down. At a time when our product was most needed by the Reich,” he finished bitterly.

He gestured toward several men working on the machinery. “We are in the process of readying the plant to resume production, as you can see.”

They walked past the breakers, the spinning devices, the forming and laying machines. At the far end of the ropery was a large storage room. A few old bales of deteriorated fiber and a couple of huge coils of old rope were shoved against the wall; otherwise the place was empty, awaiting new production material. At the far end was a door. Ludwig headed for it.

“We have partitioned off a room from the storage area,” he said. “For the use of
Achse
travelers.” He smiled, revealing badly decayed teeth. “Ostensibly a rest area for our workers, of course. You will be comfortable there until we are ready to pass you on.”

“When?”

Ludwig pursed his lips. “Possibly tomorrow morning.”

Willi glanced at Eva. She looked tired. She could do with a good night’s rest. The last six weeks had made her condition quite noticeable. It must be a great strain on her. He admired her. She had not complained. But it was obviously becoming difficult, if not impossible, for her to travel any great distances via bicycle or by walking. And they still had a long way to go. The most difficult part. He turned to Ludwig.

“How will we travel?” he asked.

Ludwig shook his head. “I do not know that yet,” he said. “I will be informed. Memmingen is a
Verteilerkopf
on the
Achse
— an important distribution center. Other routes branch off here. Travel must be coordinated.” He glanced at Eva, not quite able to hide his disapproval. “I shall try to obtain—eh, suitable transportation,” he said archly. “By motorcar, perhaps by train.”

Willi nodded. “We will wait,” he said.

“Excellent,” Ludwig agreed. “It is best you remain here. Tomorrow is Sunday. There will be many
Amis
in town. I will have your new Military Government permits for you by then.”

“Tomorrow then,” Willi said. “Meanwhile, might we have something to eat?”

“Of course. I shall bring you some food.” Ludwig left.

Eva sat down on one of the beds. She hoped Ludwig would bring something soft to eat. Like
Leberwurst.
She still had trouble chewing, with those teeth missing in her lower jaw. If only she could have had that bridge put in. She sighed. She was bone tired. Her back—in fact her entire body—ached. She sank back, trying to relax.

Suddenly she felt a tiny movement in her abdomen. A distinct little push. Or kick. All at once she was overwhelmed with tenderness. It was the quickening. She was certain now. A small new life was growing in her—and had made its presence felt. Gently she placed her hands on her beginning swelling. There. Again. A little kick.

She gloried in it, a secret smile illuminating her face. She closed her eyes. In her hands she lovingly cradled the tiny life within her. The life that was part her and part Adolf. A little son, they had told her.

A little boy—in the image of the Führer, Adolf Hitler.

Nördlingen had been left behind a little over half an hour before, and so had the damned baskets, except for one they had tied to the back of the bike as a carry-all. It was only just past 1800 hours and they should have no trouble reaching the Memmingen stop, sixty or sixty-five miles farther, in two and a half hours, before the 2030-hour curfew. Woody wondered what a rope-making joint would be like. He’d never seen one. The little dirt road that led directly south toward Memmingen had been virtually deserted, and they were making excellent time.

Hacker, the tailor who ran the Nördlingen stop, had been only too happy to speed them on their way. It had actually taken him less than an hour to get their forged AMG permits renewed to Memmingen, and hustle up a couple of gallons of black market gasoline for their motorbike. Nervously he’d asked them not to wait in his shop, but to go to a
Gasthaus
nearby to eat and come back for their papers later—on the pretext of picking up Woody’s jacket which he left for repair. The man had explained that there was a strong possibility that authorities would come to his shop. He—and the
Anlaufstelle
operation—were in no direct danger, but a customer who had left several items of clothing with him earlier in the day, had been found brutally murdered. By the Werewolves, they said. And investigators might come to his shop to talk to him. He had apparently been the last to see her alive. It was best to take no chances. Woody had agreed.

They were entering a little town called Dillingen on the Danube, when Woody suddenly slowed down.

Ahead a couple of jeeps were parked off the roadway and several GIs and German civilians were gathered in a group.

Woody swore under his breath. He knew at once what it was. A roadblock. A checkpoint for snap security checks. He knew where such checkpoints usually were set up; at bridges, intersections, and railroad stations, and he’d tried to avoid them. As Hacker had said, it was best to take no chances. What the hell was a roadblock doing at the town limits of a two-bit burg?

There was nothing he could do. Slowly he rolled up to the roadblock and came to a halt.

A corporal came over to them. “Off!” he ordered gruffly, gesturing for them to dismount. “Off!
Schnell!”
He pointed to the group of apprehensive German villagers huddled nearby. “
Da. Gehen,”
he said. “
Gehen! Schnell!”

Woody wheeled his bike over to the group. What the hell was going on? Nobody asked for his ID.

After a short while a sergeant, a big, burly man—looking mean and rough enough, Woody thought, to be picking his damned teeth with a rusty nail—came over to the group. Legs spread, arms akimbo, he glared at them. Brusquely he shouted. “
Mitkommen! Schnell! Alle mitkommen!
Move it!”

The ragged group of uneasy, bewildered Germans followed the noncom as he strode down the road, Woody wheeling his motorbike along. He gave Ilse a reassuring smile. She took hold of his arm.

Presently the sergeant turned off the road and headed for a large barn. Other GIs and German civilians stood outside, and a few US military vehicles were parked next to the wooden building, among them a self-propelled generator.

And Woody knew what was in store.

Shit!

The German villagers—men, women, and older children—were all herded into the barn. Inside, a large screen had been set up at one end, and a motion picture projector stood at the other. Benches, bales of hay, and planks propped up on bricks served as seating before the screen.

As Woody and Ilse made for a seat, a corpulent burger began to argue with the GI who had directed him to a seat. Red-faced and indignant the man voiced his objections. The big sergeant elbowed his way up to the man. He jutted out his jaw and glared savagely at the German. “Listen, Krauthead,” he snarled. “I’ll cut your fucking ears off and ram them up your asshole so you can hear me good when I kick your butt! Now—
sit!”

Woody grinned inwardly. It was kind of good to hear a real GI noncom sound off. He felt downright nostalgic. The German did not understand the words—but he was in no doubt about their meaning. He sat.

A lieutenant stood up before the screen, facing the crowd. The people fell silent. The officer pulled out a piece of paper and began speaking in German with only a trace of an accent.

“Pursuant to AUS directive, MGAF-GO (79),” he intoned, “every German citizen over the age of fourteen, without exception, is required to witness a screening of US Army film, TF-261.9.”

He put the paper down. He looked out over the assembled German villagers, his face hard and grim.

“What you will see,” he said harshly, “is how your former government dealt with those it considered enemies, unfit, or merely inferior. All the film you will be shown was photographed by your own SS motion picture units and deals with only a fraction of what went on in such concentration camps as Dachau, Buchenwald, and Bergen-Belsen; Auschwitz-Birkenau, Treblinka, and Mathausen; Ravensbrück, Sachsenhausen, Maidenek, and Flossenburg. All in the name of your Führer, Adolf Hitler.”

Woody felt Ilse stiffen beside him. He remembered her earlier questions about the camps. She was about to get an answer. In spades. He’d seen the “Mickey Mouse” film before, screened for other such groups. Automatically he took her hand.

The film began. The barn was eerily quiet except for the drowsy whirr of the projector. First there were the usual identifying titles and numbers—and then the shock opening Woody would never forget.

It was another barn: men, women, and children being herded inside, guarded by SS troops, tall and blond and trim in their immaculate, tailored uniforms with the silver
flashes on the collars; gasoline being poured on the straw, heaped around the wooden structure with its locked and barred doors. And the fire. Flames engulfing everything. And through the flames, through the scorched and burning wood, fire-blackened hands thrusting out through impossibly small openings, clenching and contorting in agony as the flames licked at them, eating away the flesh to expose quickly charred bone. And the head. The terrible head. The head of one desperate man who’d gouged out a big enough hole in the burning planks to force his head through, in a vain attempt to escape the hell inside. Hairless and blistered, his ears and lips charred appendages, his mouth wrenched open in a silent scream, his eyes wide in unspeakable terror—until the searing heat burst them and the hot fluid spurted from them. And through it all, the laughter and merriment, the jeering and derision of the SS guards. It was a sight he would never forget. He knew that neither would the girl who sat stiffly beside him.

And there was more. Much, much more. Narrated by a dispassionate German voice.

The piles of emaciated, white, naked bodies, already drained of blood so they would burn easier, stacked like cordwood at the crematorium ovens; a much more efficient way to dispose of the undesirables than the primitive barn burnings . . . The rows of men, women, and children being herded to the “showers,” like cattle to the slaughtering pen; crammed and locked into the common “shower room,” to suffer the indescribable agonies of being gassed by Zyklon-B . . . And the rubber-booted, cloth-mask protected men of the
Sonderkommando
who hosed down the hideous tangle of distorted bodies, interlocked by the violent spasms of death, to get rid of the feces and blood that covered them, before wrenching them apart to make room for the next group. The mountains of eyeglasses, shoes, pens, watches, and—most pitiful of all—hair, shorn from the heads of the women . . . .

At Oranienburg Concentration Camp, the voice of the narrator droned on, more than one hundred specially selected inmates of all ages were gassed and the flesh carefully boiled and stripped from their bones in order to provide undamaged skeletons for the collection at Himmler’s Institute for Practical Research in Military Science . . . .

Woody could feel Ilse tremble beside him. She clung to his hand. Ilse Gessner, he thought. A few short days ago merely a girl he resented having to drag along. And now someone who looked to him for comfort and strength, whose touch he welcomed.

On the screen a gruesome scene of executions at the site of a mass grave was taking place. Naked men and boys were made to line up at the edge of a huge open pit to be shot from behind by the executioners and conveniently topple directly into the pit on top of the bloody, mangled pile of bodies. Dead—or only near dead. Here and there a groping hand would try to struggle up from beneath the slimy snarl of gory limbs and torsos. The camera moved in on one young man, barely into his teens, kneeling at the edge of the ditch, waiting in stuporous silence for his own death. As his executioner aimed his gun at the back of his head, another stopped him. With a wide grin he pointed to the ground. The executioner fired—the bullet hitting the dirt far from its victim. But, obediently, the young man, unhurt, toppled into the grave. Bewildered he sat up, and looked back up at his killers. He crawled over the bloody bodies—until a bullet fired by the uproariously laughing guard shattered his head.

Woody heard the titters and snickers that rose above the whirr of the projector. He was not surprised. It had happened before at another such screening he had attended. He’d decided it was a nervous reaction.
Nobody
could be that callous. And yet, the screen had just proven him wrong. He gazed around at the villagers, their eyes riveted to the screen. Were they in for the same aftermath as his first “Mickey Mouse” film audience? They had not tittered the next day when they had been forced to exhume and carry the decomposed bodies from a mass grave to a cemetery for decent burial. And they had experienced what was lacking in the film. The stench. The foul odor of suffering, of disease, and decomposition. The smell of death. The stink that had seared their nostrils never to be expunged. As it had his.