Therefore Choose (15 page)

George was surprised by Peter's earnest tone. “‘There's more love of mankind in steam engines and electricity than in sexual abstinence and vegetarianism.' That's what Chekhov said.”

“At least they get steam engines,” replied Peter. “Is that what you're saying?”

They got back into the car, drove to another dock, and parked. Peter got out to make another call. George felt immobilized, dull and blank. Instead of getting out, he sat in the car and waited.

“I'm not sure I'm going to keep on with this,” said Peter when he returned. He didn't start the engine. “Think what these docks mean for our relations with the rest of the world. I don't just mean in the past.”

“I haven't thought about it enough,” George said.

“I've got a friend in the Colonial Office, in India. He's Jewish. He went out full of enthusiasm. He says the way we are with the Indians — the white people, I mean — is like some people are with the Jews, only a hundred times worse.”

“You get a glimpse of it in
A Passage to India
.”

“He says it's not even a question for most of the English over there as to whether Indians are inferior. They're automatically lazy, untrustworthy, dirty, and so on. Their only place, even when they're educated, is to be menials. Somehow I hadn't put that together with this, not until about a year ago.”

“These are our receiving facilities …”

“Here I am,” said Peter. “Doing a job that shrieks of inequality. On the basis of what? On the basis of the fact that they don't live in Surrey. The Indians earn nothing, just the minimum to subsist. Slavery was abolished in 1807. But this continues.”

“You mean trade.”

“This stuff is called goods. Good for whom?”

George could see Peter was agitated. Not about himself, not about a mismanaged love affair. This was something of consequence.

“In medieval times,” said Peter, “people were exercised by original sin — about one's conscience, one's individual soul. This is the modern version, more pervasive. Every time you have a cup of tea. It's in everything we do.”

“I hadn't thought.”

“I'm thinking of putting in for a transfer. Housing, or Education perhaps, or Planning…would that be less objectionable? We need to plan where people can live and work. Or is it really just the same?”

Suddenly George realized: this was why he wanted to show me the docks, rather than just going out one evening. I'm too wrapped up in myself. Peter was one of the people who knew what he wanted to do in his life. Now he's in a state and I've not said a single syllable to help him.

Just as it had made sense
for the Germans to re-establish the state that, in the Weimar years, people thought was too weak, one could argue that it made sense to retake, in 1938, the areas they thought had been lost, to extend German government to German-speaking people in Austria and Czechoslovakia. Then it made sense to think there was no need to go overseas, as the English had done when they established their colonies. For Germany, materials and food and labour were close at hand, in the Slavic lands. This was an age of empires. Empire — that's what
Reich
means. The Third Reich.

In September 1939, war was declared. Just as the English had needed an army to colonize America and India, now the Germans needed an army to push into Poland. Thus began the war that no one wanted.

When George read the letter from Anna, he imagined Werner's voice, imagined him in uniform with a troop of young men who admired him. Now he imagined the sense of excitement that Werner and his men would have had as they drove their military vehicles into Poland.

Did Anna bring Werner the same lovely gusts of affection? Of course she did. George imagined her doing things with Werner that she had done with him.

When George had travelled to Berlin with Werner in 1936, and when he had met Anna, for the most part he remembered a time of closeness, despite the tensions among the three of them, mirrored by tensions around them. Like millions of others, they were affected by what they saw and what they read in the newspapers, but they got on with their lives. Now very few people in Europe could get on with their lives.

Had Werner been underhand? Had he taken advantage of Anna when she was at her most vulnerable, when her magazine closed, when her friends left, when her mother was ill?

In 1940, with the news of Dunkirk, it looked as if the Germans would invade England. The way of life that seemed so critical to George when he was thinking of Anna was threatened. It seemed plain that he had to join up. The easiest thing would have been to enlist as a medical officer. But there'd be plenty of doctors. With his loss of Anna, George no longer felt inclined towards the easiest thing.

Though George had worried long over choosing not to stay and live with Anna in Berlin, he made the decision to join the army rather quickly. He volunteered as a combatant. Was there some lingering anger? Was his decision to join a fighting unit of a piece with his rejection of Germany, the society that had made it impossible for him to be with Anna?

George was posted to the 52nd Lowland Division, and he became an artillery officer.

The Germans did not invade. George's training was in mountain warfare, in the Cairngorms of Scotland. His regiment learned to ski, to build igloos, to dismantle guns and take them up and down snow-covered mountains on mules. His unit was poised to dash across the North Sea to invade Norway. Although it is said that they tied down some of Hitler's crack units in Scandinavia, they did not go to Norway.

The period in Scotland was not unpleasant. George liked his fellow officers and, somewhat to his surprise, found that army life was not bad. His men respected him; he became a specialist in mountain warfare. Though sometimes he wondered about fighting against the country in which lived the two people to whom he'd felt most close, he thought he had done the right thing.

George no longer suffered from intense jealous images of Anna and Werner together. He'd not been able to face living in Germany. Had he gone, he would at best, now, be in a concentration camp. For Anna and him the time was out of joint; it was the Nazis who'd made their love impossible. Was that why he decided to join an artillery regiment rather than be a medic? He'd loved both Werner and Anna; perhaps it was good that they could have a little happiness. Despite army life being strenuous, George found himself sometimes sunk in deep melancholy. He kept his notebook still, a smaller one, which he could put in a pocket, and he continued to write. In periods of loneliness, he wanted to write.

George's regiment trained in Scotland for more than three years, then crossed the Channel three months after the D-Day landings. Their first battle was in Holland, below sea level. The highest hill they climbed in their campaigns was three hundred feet. Their job was to sweep eastwards through the Low Countries and Germany, to harass German troops as they retreated.

Often, as his guns fired, he wondered whether his shells might kill Anna or kill Werner, or kill them both. Did either of them think of him? he wondered.

It was the middle of April 1945
when Harold, a medical officer, came to find George.

“There's something we should see,” he said. “A concentration camp called Belsen, with tens of thousands of people in it. It was surrendered yesterday. Not far from here, and some of our medical people have been asked to look at it. I know you don't like to think of yourself as medical any more, but do you want to come?”

“We can go in my jeep,” said George.

Harold and George were in the same regiment, and from the beginning of their training in Scotland, they had become friends because of their background. Harold would sometimes ask George's medical opinion, though never needfully. He was ill suited to the army: on the shy side, uncomfortable in the officers' mess. He didn't drink. He read a passage from the Bible each morning.

“Why are you doing this?” George had asked Harold when each had first told the other a bit about himself. “In a fighting unit.”

“I'd sooner not be,” he said. “I thought of being a conscientious objector, but I have a wife and a son. I need a salary. Being a non-combatant is a compromise.”

The morning on which George and Harold set off for Belsen was bright and sunny. Harold had a map, and the map reference of the camp. They drove through peaceful countryside. Cows grazed in the fields. On a well-kept lawn in front of a substantial house, they saw three children playing. They reached the camp. Barbed wire enclosed rows of huts, and there were observation towers with searchlights. The British Army was there, with much bustling about. Through the wire they could see camp inmates standing in groups. Some were even quite well dressed. Some were lying on the ground.

“Perhaps the reports were exaggerated,” said Harold. “People lying around: it could be Hampstead Heath on a bank holiday.”

As they entered, they saw that they had been wrong. Those lying down were not sunning themselves. They were close to death, too ill to move. When they came across their first obvious corpse beside one of the main thoroughfares, Harold went white. At cookhouses, people waited to be fed. The British authorities had put up some canvas sheeting, which some people were using for shelter, while in another place it gave people a little privacy as they relieved themselves.

There were people of both sexes and all nationalities: Russians, Poles, Hungarians, French. Germans were a minority.

One group to whom George talked was originally from Budapest but could speak German. They said they were Jewish. They had come on a forced march from the east, from a camp in Poland. They said the SS did not dare surrender the camp to the advancing Russians, so they were brought here.

“You think this is bad,” said one woman. “It's a holding place. You did not see where we came from. Auschwitz: a factory for killing people.”

As George and Harold talked to inmates they learned that some concentration camps were for slave labour, but some were for extermination. The Nazis had not stopped with driving people out of their jobs and destroying their property as they had done before the war began. They planned to rid Europe entirely of those they defined as undesirable.

Camp inmates told George and Harold that this camp was mainly for political offences such as grumbling against the state or failing to get off the pavement when a German officer approached. They said that even the strongest were dead within four months after they arrived. Five to six hundred people died each day. In March there had been seventeen thousand deaths. For a week before the British arrived there had been no food in the camp, and the only water had been from stagnant pools that served as fire reservoirs.

As George and Harold walked round the camp, the horror became clearer. There was debris everywhere, ragged clothes, pieces of rugs, presumably left by those who had died, since bodies were apparently removed naked.

The stench was unspeakable. Behind huts people lay in the last degrees of starvation. One old man they saw talked gibberish in the delirium of one about to die, but apart from his lips nothing else moved. No one took any notice: it was too common.

The wooden huts were not large; each housed fifty or so. Most had three-tier bunks, without bedclothes. They went into one hut that housed fifty women in which there were not even bunks. Women were lying on sacks and rags on the floor. It was so crowded that it was difficult for George and Harold to pick their way through. They saw the camp crematorium, still with human remains in it.

The most shocking sight was a British soldier, with a cigarette hanging from the side of his mouth, driving a bulldozer. He was digging a mass grave and pushing bodies into huge piles. The bodies were naked, scarcely bodies: no longer flesh, they were bones wrapped loosely in skin, awaiting the completion of the burial pit. Inmates who were still alive, men, women, children, stood and watched.

The camp was a place of deliberate starvation in the middle of a well-farmed, prosperous countryside.

More bodies were brought. The British soldier, still with his cigarette — it must have gone out by now — backed the bulldozer, then pushed some bodies towards one of the piles. A man with a camera was filming the bulldozer, filming the bodies, tangled and compressed by the powerful machine.

It's being recorded, thought George. Who will see it? A few officials, perhaps? Or more people? Will they feel there's something here that we humans should all know? And if they showed it in newsreels all round the world, what would people see? They'd see some images on a cinema screen. What would they feel? Would they feel this very thing, right here, with these bodies who once were people who lived and worked and loved, who've been reduced to grotesque corpses? These were civilians. This place came into being with human will to create these very effects, starvation, disease, to reduce human beauty to bundles of bones, to be pushed with a bulldozer.