The Children's War (153 page)

23

“W
HERE
SHALL WE WALK TODAY?”
Barbara asked. It was Sunday, time for a long, leisurely stroll.

“Down by the river?” Peter suggested.

“Again?”

“I like the river. I never got to walk along the embankment as a kid since it was closed to
Nichtdeutsch.
You know, too close to Westminsterschloss.”

“But we’ve gone there the last several weeks. And it’s cold by the water. Isn’t there somewhere else?” Barbara moaned.

“How about the ruins of St. Paul’s then? I used to like going there. They’re quite spooky, but you get a good feel for just how grand it must have been.”

Barbara shook her head sadly.“Haven’t you looked at any maps?”

“No, why?”

“They redeveloped that area ages ago. It’s all offices now.”

“Oh. I didn’t know that.” He paused, remembering the ghostly remains of the great cathedral with a fond sadness. “Hmm. Okay, then, how would you like to see my gravestone?”

“Your what?” she responded, appropriately confused.

“I’ll show you. Come on, it’s a nice long walk and the orphanage grounds are nicely gardened. Though I suppose nothing looks good this time of year.”

So they bundled up against the cold, damp wind and set off. They took a taxi for the first part of the journey through East Göbbels and the Worker Districts, both of which were neither pleasant nor safe to walk through, and alit at Bekton, near a long dock just off the Temms. The area was not particularly pleasant
either, but it was safe enough for Germans, or at least it was the last time he had been there.

As they walked along the dockside, Barbara commented, “So, you still get to walk by your beloved water.”

“I always dreamed of following it out to the sea. But just like the freshwater, I got trapped by the tides always shoving me back upstream.”

“That’s quite poetic,” Barbara commented. It was not clear if she was teasing.

They strolled along the dock to the river and along the river for a short while until they were driven away from the banks by industry.

“This isn’t the direct route, is it?” Barbara asked as she peered at the rows of houses along the tiny lanes.

“No. I just thought you’d like a stroll.”

“And you get to dream of sailing away?”

“Yeah.”

As they turned a corner, a blank brick wall came into view; they walked along the wall and then through a gate in it. Nobody challenged them, it was not that sort of place. They strolled along the grounds, skirting the concrete-block buildings that formed a square of barracks around an enclosed playground. It was not yet afternoon and nobody was outside—presumably the residents were inside attending a rally or some other appropriately patriotic function.

Peter and Barbara continued past the barracks and around several other buildings that might serve as a school or administrative center, or perhaps the mess hall. Behind those, the well-kept gardens suddenly grew unkempt and wild. Here and there white stones had been placed like paving stones, but they were not conveniently laid out, and as Peter led Barbara over the weeds, he avoided stepping on any. The ground grew increasingly swampy, and eventually they came to a tiny stream. They walked along it for about twenty meters so that they were directly behind the cluster of buildings. There, a few meters from the water, was a large block of concrete. They went around it and looked at the face. On this side, the weeds had been cut a bit and a path led directly back to the administrative buildings.

Peter pointed to the buildings, to a group of windows on the lower right. “I believe that’s the orphanage’s hospital,” he said as if that were relevant.

Barbara glanced at where he had indicated, but her attention was drawn back to the large stone. Names were chiseled into it. Row upon row of names. Along the top of the stone was the inscription “To our foundlings.” That’s all it said.

“What’s it mean?” she asked.

“I think it’s the gravestone for all these children.”

“But why so obscure? And there’s only one date by each name—like that one, two-sixty, February 1960.”

“I don’t think it’s February, I think it’s two,” he explained. “I think the child was born in 1960 and was two when he died.”

“Is that a typically English format?”

“No, I think they were deliberately obscure because they never admitted that any of these children died. My guess is, they buried the bodies under those paving stones but kept them alive in the record books so they could get the extra rations of food and medicine.”

“Oh, so they wouldn’t want any evidence like gravestones around—just in case a nosy official wandered back here.” Barbara glanced uneasily at the graveyard she had just walked over. Swampy ground—what a mess! And there was mud all over her shoes now. Was it somebody’s remains?

“Yeah. I’d guess though that someone felt uncomfortable not commemoratingthe poor little ones, so they put this up. If you add the ages to the years, you’ll see that a lot would have died during the various epidemics. That would make sense.”

“What brought you back here?” Barbara asked, glancing at the semiwild appearance of the little plot of ground in the middle of the city’s eastern edge.

“Oh, I came out here to see where Peter Halifax was supposed to have grown up. Authenticating research. I stumbled across this, and his name there.” He pointed to the inscription. “Born same year as me, but the poor little tyke didn’t make it past two.”

“Do you think they murdered these kids?” Barbara motioned toward the white paving stones.

“I don’t think so. They’d be unlikely to advertise it like this if they did. Look, see all the Coventrys and Halifaxes and other nuked-city names? My guess is those babes were pretty sick when they were brought here. Besides, I toured the place once, on the pretext of looking for my brother, and it seemed okay inside.”

Barbara nodded as though reassured. Funny that it would matter after all these years. “What did they do when the kids were supposed to be released into society?”

“That happens at twelve. My guess is they sold or gave the names to the Underground. Good, clean, genuine backgrounds—their papers would be valuable.” Unlike the children themselves, he thought sadly.

“My shoes are soaked and my feet are getting cold.”

“Yeah, we should go before someone notices us.” Peter threw one last glance at all the names. Row upon row of names. If he was right and they eventually ended up as Underground identities, the monument could one day serve as a death warrant for hundreds of people. The dates on the monument stopped abruptly and no other stones were around. Maybe that was why. Or maybe as the staff had continued to secretly bury the endless stream of little corpses in their backyard, maybe they had, from sheer heartache, ceased to care.

24

T
HE
SS
OFFICER WHO HAD BEEN PRESENT
at Peter’s interrogation was reassigned to Scotland within days of the action. Nevertheless, his body was found in a Glaswegian alley only weeks later. He had been stripped of his clothes and bludgeoned, apparently with a cricket bat. Citing the protocols, the Home Army claimed responsibility, though they had not actually carried out the execution. Judging from Peter’s testimony, they had determined that he was the senior officer present and therefore responsible for all that had happened, and as a result they had condemned him to death. They had only just been arranging the fellow’s demise when their procedures had been preempted either by an informed friend or by an assailant with a different and unknown agenda. In any case, the court shrugged its shoulders, declared justice as having been done, and left well enough alone. They decided to take no action against the guards involved since they were clearly only following orders. The responsibility to be apportioned to the interrogator, it was decided, was sufficiently unclear that he, too, was not condemned.

Zosia accepted the decision of the tribunal without question—a clear sign to those who knew her that she had not accepted it at all. She struck first against the guard who had actually strangled Joanna. He was not particularly bright and it was easy to entice him alone into an alley with a promise of a special deal on some smuggled fruit. Tadek came up from behind him as he sniffed at the oranges and placed a gun in the small of his back. They quickly bound his hands, then Zosia informed him that she was the mother of the little girl he had strangled. She smiled sweetly as she placed the piano wire around his neck. Realization slowly took root and a look of terror spread across his face. Zosia waited only that long, not long enough for him to beg, then she garroted him.

He was too large to swing into a wall, so Tadek obliged Zosia by breaking his head open with a concrete block. Although the man was already dead, Tadek was clearly perturbed by such a retribution on the corpse, and he threw the block down in disgust afterward. “It’s to leave a message, Tadziu, for the protection of the living ones,” Zosia reminded him as she stared at the grotesquely damaged corpse at her feet.

The second guard was no greater a challenge. He was removed on the same day, before news of his comrade’s fate reached him. He was intercepted by Tadek and Jacek, another friend of Zosia’s, as he left a bar. They pulled him into a bombed-out store and bound him to a chair. He stared drunkenly at his attackers, trying to explain that they could have his money if they wanted it and did not seem to understand the coldly worded explanation of his situation. Not until
Zosia appeared before him, her blond hair haloed by the diffuse light from the street.

“Ah, an angel!” he guessed. “An angel.”

“You murdered my daughter. And tortured my husband.”

“No, that must be someone else. I don’t do that sort of thing!” The man shook his head, slurring his words in his sudden attempt at sense.

“So unimportant that you don’t even remember,” she said sadly, then refreshed his memory.

As he recognized the incident and realized that there was no denying his involvement, he began to plead. “But I didn’t do anything! I was just there! I was just following orders!”

“Too bad,” Zosia replied coldly.

“Oh, that poor little girl! I’ve dreamt about her, oh, it was terrible. I had no idea. Please, please, please don’t hurt me! Oh, how you must ache, I know, it’s terrible. I’ve protested, did you know? I’ve made a complaint, it was so terrible . . .”

“No, you didn’t.”

“Other children died. Did you know that? Your bomb killed innocent children, civilians—”

“It wasn’t ours,” Zosia cut his defense short as she saw Tadek make a motion about time. With her delicate hands she grasped the man’s neck, and with one firm motion she drove her thumbs into his throat and crushed his windpipe. Nervous about the possibility of a patrol detecting them, Jacek and Tadek did not wait to see if he was dead; they unbound the body, grabbed one leg each, and on the count of three swung the body clumsily into a wall. They dropped the body, panting with their exertion and nervous fear.

“It’s not like doing it to a five-year-old, is it?” Zosia asked no one in particular. Though battered, the guard’s head was not broken, and he looked up at her with wildly unseeing eyes. Sighing heavily, Zosia picked up the stone she had prepared and raised it high over those staring eyes.

“Let me do that!” Tadek insisted quietly.

Zosia hammered the stone down onto the man’s head. She winced at the spray of blood, raised the stone, and brought it down again with greater force. The third time she raised the stone, Tadek intercepted her and removed it from her trembling hands. “Let’s go home,” he soothed as Jacek hurriedly wiped her face and arms, then threw a cloak over her shoulders.

Zosia stared unmoving at the corpse as Tadek repeated, “Let’s go home, Zosiu, it’s over.”

The interrogator proved to be more troublesome. His natural caution had been heightened by the fate of the two guards who had happened to work a shift with him one evening some time ago. He went to his superiors and explained his suspicions about a vendetta being carried out, but he was assured with wide smiles and generous pats on the back that no such thing was possible. When he
pressed, he was asked if he had ever before exhibited such a lack of patriotic trust. No, he insisted, it was just that circumstances . . . What circumstances? So, he explained how both guards had been left in a state similar to that of the little girl who had been . . . and here he hesitated. Had been what? he was asked. There was a girl who had died in custody from wounds from the bomb blast, he was forced to concede. So? they asked. Nothing, he replied.

He applied for a transfer and waited nervously for the answer. He learned of the SS officer’s death in Scotland on the same day that he received the rejection for his transfer. He sighed his resignation. Perhaps it was just coincidence. There was a lot of crime in the city, much of it kept under wraps for fear of scaring away colonists. Perhaps it was just two coincidental acts of wanton violence so typical of the Slavs. Perhaps there was nothing to fear.

Nevertheless, he carefully locked his doors and windows, he only went out with well-trusted friends, he never went out alone if he could help it, he stayed away from all but the most well-guarded parts of the town, and he looked behind himself constantly. His life became a misery of fear.

He applied for a transfer again, this time to Berlin, citing family difficulties at home. He received his transfer and left as soon as possible for the safety of his hometown. There, for the first time in weeks, he breathed easily as he walked the pleasant tree-lined streets. If only everywhere in the Reich could be as marvelously organized and purely Aryan as Berlin! The peace and prosperity, the calm domestic bliss, he thought, as he skirted around some
Zwangsarbeiter
collecting litter. Away from all that violence, he mused as he walked past the blank walls of the local prison. Safe, among good people who know what’s right, he ruminated as he perused the windows of a shop that had changed names decades ago and whose owners had disappeared forever. So tranquil, he pronounced as he strolled past the posted newspapers declaring the complete destruction of some resistance somewhere and the hanging of hundreds of terrorists. Ah, if only the rest of the world could be so virtuous and organized!

Sometimes the interrogator’s mind strayed to the little girl whose death had led to his transfer. She had been quite charming; pity that the parents had been so careless with her life. Even if she was a natural inferior, it was not pleasant seeing the results of their folly. He did not know exactly what the father had done, but it was clearly something quite horrendous; even he seemed to be aware of that. And there had been numbers on his arm! Clearly a renegade. What business had he destroying the social order, running around loose like some wild man, breeding his filth and corruption into their society, disrupting the purity of the populace? And he had denied his own daughter! What a piece of filth! What a traitor! Better to end that poor girl’s life than let her carry that criminal’s blood in her veins.

So, the proceedings had been right and just, yet still he suffered. It was so unfair! His transfer had removed him from the fast track that he had worked so hard to place himself on, and in his file, no doubt, was a line about his “fears”
and possible disloyalty. Doubtless his determination to do whatever the Reich required would now be questioned, and his precipitous move away from interrogations would be a black mark on his record that would take years to wash away. That one day of work had utterly ruined his career! Always, his thoughts progressed along the same line, and he always found himself quite furious at the perfidy of Peter’s unknown crime and the disgusting fact of his continued existence. Troublemakers, all of them!

Upon hearing of the transfer, Zosia pounded her fists and wept with frustration. Tadek advised her to let it go—whatever message they had wanted to send had been sent. Enough of the local soldiers knew about the other two that they would soon all know. Still Zosia was not satisfied. Each time she walked into her empty little apartment, each time she did not hear Joanna’s voice singing in the corridor, each time she thought of her innocent child’s brains being crushed against that concrete wall, she pounded her fists and wept. Gone, gone forever, and the man responsible walked free and happy in Berlin. It was intolerable!