Roots of Evil (29 page)

‘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 Göering 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…

Michael shivered again and waited, and at last, as if she was coming back from a long way away, Alice said softly, ‘Yes. Alraune was born inside Auschwitz.’

If Buchenwald had been hell’s outpost, Auschwitz was its deepest cavern, and the minute Alice entered it she knew that all the stories about hellfire were wrong. Hell did not burn: it froze, with a deep, despairing bone-coldness.

It was night when the armed escort drove through the gates, and the camp was shrouded in a pouring violet dusk. Discs of harsh white light from the watch-towers moved constantly to and fro; they shone on the rows of barrack huts and the concrete exercise yards, and then swung round to the east, to silhouette several massively tall chimneys jutting up from a cluster of brick buildings on the camp’s far side. Alice stared at these buildings for a moment, and then the searchlights moved again, this time catching the glint of black iron on the ground – parallel lines of railway sleepers. There were several open-topped railway trucks nearby. So
Auschwitz had its own private railway line. To bring prisoners in? To take them out?

She got down from the armoured truck, and stood for a moment feeling the place’s atmosphere sink its bony fingers into her mind and her heart. For a moment there was nothing in the world save this coldness, and this utter and complete hopelessness. Dreadful. I survived Buchenwald, but I don’t think I can survive this. Or can I? How about Deborah and Conrad? Yes, for them, I think can survive it.

She clutched the small bundle of belongings she had been allowed to bring out of Buchenwald – shoes, some threadbare underclothes, that precious letter from her parents telling her Deborah had reached them safely – and as the gates closed behind the truck, the guards took her through the compound, towards one of the barrack huts. The door was unlocked, Alice was pushed unceremoniously inside, and the lock clicked home once more. Shut in. But with what? And with whom?

It was not completely dark in the hut, but only thin threads of light trickled through the cracks in the window-shutters. Alice could make out only vague shapes – narrow beds with people on them, most of them sitting up and looking questioningly towards her. But she barely took this in, because as soon as the door had closed she had had to fight not to retch from the smell. It was like a solid wall, assaulting her whole being – stale human sweat and other human exudences best not identified too precisely. But she stood still, forcing her body not to rebel and waiting for her eyes to adjust to the dimness. Presently she was able to look about her, and she saw
that several of the hut’s occupants had padded across the floor and were standing quite close to her. They’re inspecting me, thought Alice. They’re sizing me up.

She was more exhausted than she could ever remember being in her entire life – the journey from Buchenwald had taken over ten hours – but she summoned up her last shreds of energy, and said in German, ‘Good evening to you all. I’m sorry about the abrupt entrance. I’m a – a new prisoner.’ Hateful word. ‘Is there – have you any means of making a light so that I can see you and you can see me?’

There was a pause, and then the thin scrape of a match or perhaps a tinder. Three or four tiny candle flames burned up, and half a dozen or so faces swam through the darkness, lit from below to hollow disembodied life.

‘What’s your name?’ said one, and Alice realized for the first time that they were all women. So at least there was still a semblance of segregation in this place.

‘Whoever you are, you must be important to be brought here as a single prisoner,’ said a second voice. ‘The guards usually bring people in by the dozen.’

‘I’ve been brought here from Buchenwald,’ said Alice. ‘I don’t know why I’m here on my own, though.’ She paused, aware of them studying her, trying to decide whether to give them her real name. Would the Buchenwald officials have sent her here as Lucretia von Wolff or as Alice Wilson?

Then the one who had spoken first, said suddenly, ‘I know who you are. You’re that rich baroness – von Wolff, that’s your name. Lucretia von Wolff. You make films – I’ve seen you on them.’

Well, at least that decision’s made for me, thought Alice.

‘In that case,’ said the voice who had asked where she was from, ‘we know all about you. You’re a
spy
, Madame von Wolff.’ She spat the word out as if it was poison. ‘You spied inside Buchenwald for the Nazis – we heard all about you.’

‘We have our own ways of hearing what goes on in the other camps,’ said a third voice, and there was a murmur of assent, threaded with hostility.

‘We have our own ways of dealing with spies, as well.’

Alice flinched at the angry hatred in their voices, and took an instinctive step backwards before remembering that the door was locked.

‘Are you here to spy on us?’ said a new voice, hard and accusing.

‘I’m not here to spy. I never have spied. I was working against the Germans in Buchenwald—’

‘Oh yes, of course you were,’ said a younger voice sarcastically. ‘Don’t you know all spies say that? “I did it for my own country…I was a double spy, working for Poland, or Czechoslovakia or the Ukraine.” That’s a load of shit, baroness. You had a very profitable little game going on in Buchenwald – we heard about your cosy dinners with Karl Koch and your sherry parties with von Ribbentrop.’

‘And now,’ said the first one, ‘you’re here to spy out our secrets and then go running to the Gestapo with them.’

Fighting to speak calmly, Alice said, ‘You’ve got it all wrong. What can I do – what can I say – to convince
you?’ But even if she had not been recognized, her instincts were warning her not to disclose her real identity. She might one day be very glad to have Alice Wilson’s identity to escape into. ‘Truly, I never worked for the Nazis,’ she said.

By now the small flames had burned up a little and she could see the hut more clearly. The narrow beds were arranged in rows along both walls, and at one end was a squat iron stove with a metal cup carefully placed on its surface as if some liquid was being warmed. Several of the dimly seen figures seemed to be huddled around the stove, their thin hands held out to it. Alice, trying to take in as much as she could through the sick waves of exhaustion, had the fleeting impression of some kind of organized grouping, as if turns might be taken to sit around the stove for warmth.

‘I’m here because I cheated the Gestapo,’ she said.

‘How? What did you do to cheat?’

The voice was still hard and uncompromising, as if its owner was prepared to dismiss as lies any kind of answer given, but Alice said as levelly as possible, ‘I supplied false information about escapes from the camp. Several of us did so – we fooled the commandant and made it possible for others to get out.’

‘I say she’s lying,’ said a woman from the stove, who had not spoken yet. ‘Leave her to her own devices. That’s what we do with jackals who snoop for the Gestapo, don’t we?’

There was another murmur of assent, and they turned away, leaving Alice standing helplessly inside the door. Panic swept in again, this time at the prospect of being
an outcast in this place. Shunned by the prisoners, and certainly the focus of the guards’ enmity, since they would know what she had done at Buchenwald.

The thought had barely formed when there was the sound of footsteps outside. The hut door was unlocked and the violet dusklight slanted in, showing up the bare floorboards and the sparse furnishings. But even before that happened, the tiny comforting candle-flames had been quenched and the accusing faces had melted into the darkness.

Four men stood in the doorway, all of them in the dark uniform of the Gestapo. The tallest of them stepped across the threshold, his lips thinning into a fastidious line as the smell of unwashed bodies reached him. A thin scar puckered the skin of his face from the cheekbone to the corner of his mouth. Sabre scar, thought Alice, as the searchlights fell across the man’s face. The duelling scar that was once a mark of honour among German officers. It gave his mouth a twisted, snarling look, so that just for a moment it was as if a wolf had donned a human mask, and as if the mask had slipped a little.

His eyes rested on her, and then in a terse clipped voice he said, ‘Baroness?’ It was not quite a question; it was more as if he was identifying her to himself, but Alice lifted her chin challengingly, and said, ‘Yes.’

‘I am Rudolf Mildner, chief of Gestapo at Kattowicz and head of the political department at Auschwitz. You are to come with us.’ He nodded to the men with him, and two of them grabbed Alice’s arms, so that she was forced to let go of her small bundle of belongings.

‘Where are you taking her?’ demanded the woman
who had seemed to be the leader of the hut’s occupants, and this time there was an unmistakable note of protest in her voice. Alice could see now that she was younger than the others, and that she had the distinctive high cheekbones of an Eastern European.

‘She will be punished for her behaviour and her deceit,’ said Mildner. ‘She is an arrogant bitch who attempted to make fools of the Third Reich.’

‘It was not very difficult to do so,’ said Alice softly, and this time there was a definite wave of warmth from several of the women.

But Mildner’s eyes snapped with fury and he came closer, his thin lips twisting into the wolf-snarl again. ‘Tonight, baroness,’ he said, ‘you will be taught a lesson. It will be a lesson you will not forget, and from it you will learn that those caught trying to deceive the Führer receive no mercy.’

Alice was never to know exactly where in the camp the Gestapo took her that night. Auschwitz was too alien for her to work out its layout, and too big. In any case, the world had shrunk to a hopeless misery where time had ceased to exist or even to matter, and where all paths looked the same.

The months inside Buchenwald had taught her that to struggle against the SS or the Gestapo was useless, but she did struggle, although it was a hopeless sobbing struggle and she knew she would not escape.

Mildner’s men took her to a low brick building and pushed her into a long room that looked as if it might be some kind of officers’ mess. There were tables and
chairs, and the semblance of a bar at one end with drinks and glasses set out. The curtains were drawn against the night, and an iron stove stood in one corner, roaring its iron-smelling heat into the room. Four Gestapo officers were seated at a table; they turned as Alice was pushed through the door, inspecting her with their eyes.

With a fair assumption of anger, she said to Mildner, ‘Why have you brought me here?’

He gave the smile that only lifted half of his mouth. ‘I told you that you were to be taught a lesson, baroness,’ he said. ‘And so you are. For my men it will be a very pleasurable lesson.’ He paused, and two of the men laughed in a horrid jeering way. Alice hated them.

And then a figure seated in one of the deep, high-backed chairs stood up and walked towards her. The light from the iron stove fell across his face, and there was a moment when one eye caught the red glow, and seemed to swell and to grow to monstrous proportions. Alice stared at him, a wholly different horror rushing at her.

Leo Dreyer. Leo Dreyer here in Auschwitz, as cool and as in command as ever. He was again wearing a monocle, the black silk string lying across his face like a sleeping insect, and even through her fear Alice could feel the authority that radiated from him.

‘So,’ he said, softly, ‘you thought you would escape the realities of Buchenwald by making that devil’s bargain with the fool Karl Koch, did you, baroness?’

‘It took you a long time to realize how much of a fool he was,’ retorted Alice.

‘It does not matter. He is being suitably dealt with,’
said Dreyer. ‘You were more the fool to think you could double-cross us. But you, also, will be dealt with.’

‘How, precisely? And what is your idea of suitable? I ask out of a sense of involvement rather than vulgar curiosity,’ said Alice, and thought: well, that came out more or less all right, although there was a hint of a tremor towards the end. Damn.

If Dreyer had heard the tremor he gave no sign. He said, ‘Tonight, my dear, you are going to pay for your naïve arrogance at Buchenwald. Tonight Mildner’s men are going to draw lots for you.’

At these words the men moved forwards, and while two of them held her arms behind her back, two more undressed her. They took their time, laughing when she aimed a kick at them, laying each item of clothing on a chair, considering her body at every stage.

‘A bit too thin for my taste,’ said one of them, and the other said, dismissively, ‘But that’s the camps. They always look half-starved.’

They carried her to a long deep sofa, and one of them stood guard while the others grouped themselves around the table and took it in turns to cut a pack of playing cards set out by the youngest of the officers.

‘Highest to go first,’ said one of them, glancing at Mildner, who nodded carelessly. The men paused to refill their glasses: Alice thought they were drinking schnapps or perhaps kümmel. Some of them were clearly becoming a bit intoxicated, but none of them seemed incapable. Neither Dreyer nor Mildner took part in the card-cutting, and when it was done Mildner moved
detachedly to the door, as if to stand guard, but Leo Dreyer remained where he was, one arm resting lightly on the high narrow mantel over the stove.

‘Try not to impregnate the bitch,’ he said offhandedly, and for the first time Alice saw a flicker of embarrassment on some of the faces and understood that while most of them felt no particular awkwardness or guilt about raping this traitor, they were uncomfortable at the idea of doing it in front of one another.

During the hour that followed Leo Dreyer scarcely took his eyes from Alice. He stood facing the deep old sofa, one hand leaning negligently on the high mantel over the stove, unobtrusively sipping his drink – except that there could never be anything in the least unobtrusive about him. Once he gestured to the young officer to refill his glass, but other than this he hardly moved. The light from the stove washed over him, and Alice knew that when the worst of tonight’s memories had faded a little (and please God they would fade), this was the image that would have burned itself indelibly into her mind. Leo Dreyer standing watching her, the hideously magnified eye behind the monocle washed to living fire by the stove’s light.