March Violets

18

Listening to the systematic destruction of another human spirit has a predictably lowering effect on one’s own fibre. I imagine that that was how it was intended to be. The Gestapo is nothing if not thoughtful. They let you eavesdrop on another’s agony to soften you up on the inside; and only then do they get to work on the outside. There is nothing worse than a state of suspense about what is going to happen, whether it’s waiting for the results of some tests at a hospital, or the headsman’s axe. You just want to get it over with. In my own small way it was a technique I had used myself at the Alex when I’d let men, suspects, sweat themselves into a state where they were ready to tell you everything. Waiting for something lets your imagination step in to create your own private hell.

But I wondered what it was that they wanted from me. Did they want to know about Six? Did they hope that I knew where the Von Greis papers were? And what if they tortured me and I didn’t know what they wanted me to tell them?

By the third or fourth day alone in my filthy cell, I was beginning to wonder if my own suffering was to be an end in itself. At other times I puzzled as to what had become of Six and Red Helfferich, who were arrested with me, and of Inge Lorenz.

Most of the time I just stared at the walls, which were a kind of palimpsest for those previous unfortunates who had been its occupants. Oddly enough there was little or no abuse for the Nazis. More common were recriminations between the Communists and the Social Democrats as to which of these two ‘fallen women’ was responsible for allowing Hitler to get elected in the first place: the Sozis blamed the Pukers, and the Pukers blamed the Sozis.

Sleep did not come easily. There was an evil-smelling pallet, which I avoided on my first night of incarceration, but as the days passed and the slop-bucket became more malodorous, I ceased to be so fastidious. It was only on the fifth day, when two S S guards came and hauled me out of my cell, that I realized just how badly I smelled: but it was nothing compared to their stink, which is of death.

They frog-marched me through a long urinous passage to a lift, and this took us up five floors to a quiet and well-carpeted corridor which, with its oak-panelled walls and gloomy portraits of the Führer, Himmler, Canaris, Hindenburg and Bismarck, had the air of an exclusive gentleman’s club. We went through a double wooden door the height of a tram and into a large bright office where several stenographers were working. They paid my filthy person no attention at all. A young S S Hauptsturmführer came round an ornate sort of desk to look disinterestedly at me.

‘Who’s this?’ With a click of his heels, one of the guards stood to attention and told the officer who I was.

‘Wait there,’ said the Hauptsturmführer and walked over to a polished mahogany door on the other side of the room, where he knocked and waited. Hearing a reply he poked his head round the door and said something. Then he turned and jerked his head at my guards who shoved me forwards.

It was a big, plush office with a high ceiling and some expensive leather furniture, and I saw that I wasn’t going to get the routine Gestapo chat over the kind of script that would have to involve the twin prompts of blackjack and brass knuckles. Not yet anyway. They wouldn’t risk spilling anything on the carpet. At the far end of the office was a French window, a set of bookshelves and a desk behind which, sitting in comfortable armchairs, were two S S officers. These were tall, sleek, well-groomed men with supercilious smiles, hair the colour of Tilsiter cheese and well-behaved Adam’s apples. The taller of the pair spoke first, to order the guards and their adjutant out of the room.

‘Herr Gunther. Please sit down.’ He pointed to a chair in front of the desk. I looked behind as the door shut, and then shuffled forwards, my hands in my pockets. Since they had taken away my shoelaces and braces at my arrest, it was the only way I had of keeping my trousers up.

I hadn’t met senior SS officers before and so I was not certain as to the rank of the two who faced me; but I guessed that one was probably a colonel, and the other, the one who continued speaking, was possibly a general. Neither one of them seemed to be any older than about thirty-five.

‘Smoke?’ said the general. He held out a box and then tossed me some matches. I lit my cigarette and smoked it gratefully. ‘Please help yourself if you want another.’

‘Thanks.’

‘Perhaps you would also like a drink?’

‘I wouldn’t say no to some champagne.’ They both smiled simultaneously. The second officer, the colonel, produced a bottle of schnapps and poured a glassful.

‘I’m afraid we don’t run to anything so grand round here,’ he said.

‘Whatever you’ve got, then.’ The colonel stood up and brought me the drink. I didn’t waste any time with it. I jerked it back, cleaned my teeth and swallowed with every muscle in my neck and throat. I felt the schnapps flush right the way down to my corns.

‘You’d better give him another,’ said the general. ‘He looks as though his nerves are a bit shaky.’ I held out my glass for the refill.

‘My nerves are just fine,’ I said, nursing my glass. ‘I just like to drink.’

‘Part of the image, eh?’

‘And what image would that be?’

‘Why, the private detective of course. The shoddy little man in the barely furnished office, who drinks like a suicide who’s lost his nerve, and who comes to the assistance of the beautiful but mysterious woman in black.’

‘Someone in the S S perhaps,’ I suggested.

He smiled. ‘You might not believe it,’ he said, ‘but I have a passion for detective stories. It must be interesting.’ His face was of an unusual construction. Its central feature was its protruding, hawk-like nose, which had the effect of making the chin seem weak; above the thin nose were glassy blue eyes set rather too close together, and slightly slanting, which lent him an apparently world-weary, cynical air.

‘I’m sure that fairy-stories are a lot more interesting.’

‘But not in your case, surely. In particular, the case you have been working on for the Germania Life Assurance Company.’

‘For which,’ the colonel chipped in, ‘we may now substitute the name of Hermann Six.’ The same type as his superior, he was better-looking if apparently less intelligent. The general glanced over a file that was open on the desk in front of him, if only to indicate that they knew everything there was to know about me and my business.

‘Precisely so,’ he murmured. After a short while he looked up at me and said: ‘Why ever did you leave Kripo?’

‘Coal,’ I said.

He stared blankly at me. ‘Coal?’

‘Yeah, you know, mouse, gravel . . . money. Speaking of which, I had 40,000 marks in my pockets when I checked into this hotel. I’d like to know what’s happened to it. And to a girl who was working with me. Name of Inge Lorenz. She’s disappeared.’

The general looked at his junior officer, who shook his head. ‘I’m afraid we know nothing about any girl, Herr Gunther,’ said the colonel. ‘People are always disappearing in Berlin. You of all people should know that. As to your money, however, that is quite safe with us for the moment.’

‘Thanks, and I don’t mean to sound ungrateful, but I’d sooner leave it in a sock underneath my mattress.’

The general put his long, thin, violinist’s hands together, as if he was about to lead us in prayer, and pressed their fingertips against his lips meditatively. ‘Tell me, did you ever consider joining the Gestapo?’ he said.

I figured it was my turn to try a little smile.

‘You know, this wasn’t a bad suit before I was obliged to sleep in it for a week. I may smell a bit, but not that badly.’

He gave an amused sort of sniff. ‘The ability to talk as toughly as your fictional counterpart is one thing, Herr Gunther,’ he said. ‘Being it is quite another. Your remarks demonstrate either an astonishing lack of appreciation as to the gravity of your situation, or real courage.’ He raised his thin, gold-leaf eyebrows and started to toy with the German Horseman’s Badge on his left breast-pocket. ‘By nature I am a cynical man. I think that all policemen are, don’t you? So normally I would be inclined to favour the first assessment of your bravado. However, in this particular case it suits me to believe in the strength of your character. Please do not disappoint me by saying something really stupid.’ He paused for a moment. ‘I’m sending you to a KZ.’

My flesh turned as cold as a butcher’s shop-window. I finished what was left of my schnapps, and then heard myself say: ‘Listen, if it’s about that lousy milk bill . . .’

They both started grinning a lot, enjoying my obvious discomfort.

‘Dachau,’ said the colonel. I stubbed out my cigarette and lit another. They saw my hand shake as I held the match up.

‘Don’t worry,’ said the general. ‘You’ll be working for me.’ He came round the desk and sat on its edge in front of me.

‘And who are you?’

‘I am Obergruppenführer Heydrich.’ He waved his arm at the colonel and folded his arms. ‘And this is Standartenführer Sohst of Alarm Command.’

‘Pleased to meet you, I’m sure.’ I wasn’t. Alarm Command were the special Gestapo killers that Marlene Sahm had talked about.

‘I’ve had my eye on you for some time,’ he said. ‘And after that unfortunate little incident at the beach house in Wannsee I have had you under constant observation, in the hope that you might lead us to certain papers. I’m sure you know the ones I mean. Instead you gave us the next best thing—the man who planned their theft. Over the past few days, while you’ve been our guest, we’ve been checking your story. It was the autobahn worker, Bock, who told us where to look for this Kurt Mutschmann fellow—the safecracker who now has the papers.’

‘Bock?’ I shook my head. ‘I don’t believe it. He wasn’t the sort to turn informer about a friend.’

‘It’s quite true, I can assure you. Oh, I don’t mean he told us exactly where to find him, but he put us on the right track, before he died.’

‘You tortured him?’

‘Yes. He told us that Mutschmann had once told him that if he were ever really wanted so that he was desperate, then he should probably think of hiding in a prison, or a KZ. Well, of course, with a gang of criminals looking for him, not to mention ourselves, then desperate is exactly what he must have been.’

‘It’s an old trick,’ explained Sohst. ‘You avoid arrest for one thing by having yourself arrested for another.’

‘We believe that Mustchmann was arrested and sent to Dachau three nights after the death of Paul Pfarr,’ said Heydrich. With a thin, smug smile he added: ‘Indeed, he was almost begging to be arrested. It seems that he was caught red-handed, painting KPD slogans on the wall of a Kripo Stelle in Neukölln.’

‘A KZ isn’t so bad if you’re a Kozi,’ chuckled Sohst. ‘In comparison with the Jews and the queers. He’ll probably be out in a couple of years.’

I shook my head. ‘I don’t understand,’ I told them. ‘Why don’t you simply have the commandant at Dachau question Mutschmann? What the hell do you need me for?’

Heydrich folded his arms and swung his jackbooted leg so that his toe was almost kicking my kneecap. ‘Involving the commandant at Dachau would also mean having to inform Himmler, which I don’t want to do. You see, the Reichsfuhrer is an idealist. He would undoubtedly see it as his duty to use these papers to punish those he perceived to be guilty of crimes against the Reich.’

I recalled Himmler’s letter to Paul Pfarr which Marlene Sahm had shown me at the Olympic Stadium and nodded.

‘I, on the other hand, am a pragmatist, and would prefer to use the papers in a rather more tactical way, as and where I require.’

‘In other words, you’re not above a bit of blackmail yourself. Am I right?’

Heydrich smiled thinly. ‘You see through me so easily, Herr Gunther. But you must understand that this is to be an undercover operation. Strictly a matter for Security. On no account should you mention this conversation to anyone.’

‘But there must be somebody among the S S at Dachau that you can trust?’

‘Of course there is,’ said Heydrich. ‘But what do you expect him to do, march up to Mustchmann and ask him where he has hidden the papers? Come now, Herr Gunther, be sensible.’

‘So you want me to find Mustchmann, and get to know him.’

‘Precisely so. Build his trust. Find out where he’s hidden the papers. And having done so, you will identify yourself to my man.’

‘But how will I recognize Mutschmann?’

‘The only photograph is the one on his prison record,’ said Sohst, handing me a picture. I looked at it carefully. ‘It’s three years old, and his head will have been shaved of course, so it doesn’t help you much. Not only that, but he’s likely to be a great deal thinner. A KZ does tend to change a man. There is, however, one thing that should help you to identify him: he has a noticeable ganglion on his right wrist, which he could hardly obliterate.’

I handed back the photograph. ‘It’s not much to go on,’ I said. ‘Suppose I refuse?’

‘You won’t,’ said Heydrich brightly. ‘You see, either way you’re going to Dachau. The difference is that working for me, you’ll be sure to get out again. Not to mention getting your money back.’

‘I don’t seem to have much choice.’

Heydrich grinned. ‘That’s precisely the point,’ he said. ‘You don’t. If you had a choice, you’d refuse. Anyone would. Which is why I can’t send one of my own men. That and the need for secrecy. No, Herr Gunther, as an ex-policeman, I’m afraid you fit the bill perfectly. You have everything to gain, or to lose. It’s really up to you.’

‘I’ve taken better cases,’ I said.

‘You must forget who you are now,’ said Sohst quickly. ‘We have arranged for you to have a new identity. You are now Willy Krause, and you are a black-marketeer. Here are your new papers.’ He handed me a new identity card. They’d used my old police photograph.

‘There is one more thing,’ said Heydrich. ‘I regret that verisimilitude requires a certain amount of further attention to your appearance, consistent with your having been arrested and interrogated. It’s rare for a man to arrive at Columbia Haus without the odd bruise. My men downstairs will take care of you in that respect. For your own protection, of course.’

‘Very thoughtful of you,’ I said.

‘You’ll be held at Columbia for a week, and then transferred to Dachau.’ Heydrich stood up. ‘May I wish you good luck.’ I took hold of my trouser band and got to my feet.

‘Remember, this is a Gestapo operation. You must not discuss it with anyone.’ Heydrich turned and pressed a button to summon the guards.

‘Just tell me this,’ I said. ‘What’s happened to Six and Helfferich, and the rest of them?’

‘I see no harm in telling you,’ he said. ‘Well then, Herr Six is under house-arrest. He is not charged with anything, as yet. He is still too shocked at the resurrection and subsequent death of his daughter to answer any questions. Such a tragic case. Unfortunately, Herr Haupthandler died in hospital the day before yesterday, having never recovered consciousness. As to the criminal known as Red Dieter Helfferich, he was beheaded at Lake Ploetzen at six o’clock this morning, and his entire gang sent to the KZ at Sachsenhausen.’ He smiled sadly at me. ‘I doubt that any harm will come to Herr Six. He’s much too important a man to suffer any lasting damage because of what has happened. So you can see, of all the other leading players in this unfortunate affair, you are the only one who is left alive. It merely remains to be seen if you can conclude this case successfully, not only as a matter of professional pride, but also your personal survival.’

The two guards marched me back to the elevator, and then to my cell, but only to beat me up. I put up a struggle but, weak from lack of decent food and proper sleep, I was unable to put up more than a token resistance. I might have managed one of them alone, but together they were more than a match for me. After that I was taken to the S S guardroom, which was about the size of a meeting hall. Near the double-thick door sat a group of S S, playing cards and drinking beer, their pistols and blackjacks heaped on another table like so many toys confiscated by a strict schoolmaster. Facing the far wall, and standing at attention in a line, were about twenty prisoners whom I was ordered to join. A young SS Sturmann swaggered up and down its length, shouting at some prisoners and booting many in the back or on the arse. When an old man collapsed onto the stone floor, the Sturmann booted him into unconsciousness. And all the time new prisoners were joining the line. After an hour there must have been at least a hundred of us.

They marched us through a long corridor to a cobbled courtyard where we were loaded into Green Minnas. No S S men came with us inside the vans, but nobody said much. Each sat quietly, alone with his own thoughts of home and loved ones whom he might never see again.

When we got to Columbia Haus we climbed out of the vans. The sound of an aeroplane could be heard taking off from nearby Tempelhof Flying Field, and as it passed over the Trojan-grey walls of the old military prison, to a man we all glanced wistfully up into the sky, each of us wishing that he were among the plane’s passengers.

‘Move, you ugly bastards,’ yelled a guard, and with many kicks, shoves and punches, we were herded up to the first floor and paraded in five columns in front of a heavy wooden door. A menagerie of warders paid us close and sadistic attention.

‘See that fucking door?’ yelled the Rottenführer, his face twisted to one side with malice, like a feeding shark. ‘In there we finish you as men for the rest of your days. We put your balls in a vice, see? Stops you getting homesick. After all, how can you want to go home to your wives and girlfriends if you’ve nothing left to go home with?’ He roared with laughter, and so did the menagerie, some of whom dragged the first man kicking and screaming into the room, and closed the door behind them.

I felt the other prisoners shake with fear; but I guessed that this was the corporal’s idea of a joke, and when eventually it came to my own turn, I made a deliberate show of calm as they took me to the door. Once inside they took my name and address, studied my file for several minutes, and then, having been abused for my supposed black-marketeering, I was beaten up again.

Once in the main body of the prison I was taken, painfully, to my cell, and on the way there I was surprised to hear a large choir of men singing If You Still Have a Mother. It was only later on that I discovered the reason for the choir’s existence: its performances were made at the behest of the S S to drown out the screams from the punishment cellar where prisoners were beaten on the bare buttocks with wet sjamboks.

As an ex-bull I’ve seen the inside of quite a few prisons in my time: Tegel, Sonnenburg, Lake Plœtzen, Brandenburg, Zellen-gefängnis, Brauweiler; every one of them is a hard place, with tough discipline; but none of them came close to the brutality and dehumanizing squalor that was Columbia Haus, and it wasn’t long before I was wondering if Dachau could be any worse.

There were approximately a thousand prisoners in Columbia. For some, like me, it was a short-stay transit prison, on the way to a KZ; for others, it was a long-stay transit camp on the way to a KZ. Quite a few were only ever to get out in a pine box.

As a newcomer on a short stay I had a cell to myself. But since it was cold at night and there were no blankets, I would have welcomed a little human warmth around me. Breakfast was coarse rye wholemeal bread and ersatz coffee. Dinner was bread and potato gruel. The latrine was a ditch with a plank laid across it, and you were obliged to shit in the company of nine other prisoners at any one time. Once, a guard sawed through the plank and some of the prisoners ended up in the cesspit. At Columbia Haus they appreciated a sense of humour.

I had been there for six days when one night, at around midnight, I was ordered to join a vanload of prisoners for transport to Putlitzstrasse Railway Station, and from there to Dachau.

Dachau is situated some fifteen kilometres north-west of Munich. Someone on the train told me that it was the Reich’s first KZ. This seemed to me to be entirely appropriate, given Munich’s reputation as the birthplace of National Socialism. Built around the remains of an old explosives factory, it stands anomalously near some farmland in pleasant Bavarian countryside. Actually, the countryside is all there is that’s pleasant about Bavaria. The people certainly aren’t. I felt sure that Dachau wasn’t about to disappoint me in this respect, or in any other. At Columbia Haus they said that Dachau was the model for all later camps: that there was even a special school there to train S S men to be more brutal. They didn’t lie.

We were helped out of the wagons with the usual boots and rifle-butts, and marched east to the camp entrance. This was enclosed by a large guardhouse underneath which was a gate with the slogan ‘Work Makes You Free’ in the middle of the iron grille-work. The legend was the subject of some contemptuous mirth among the other prisoners, but nobody dared say anything for fear of getting a kicking.

I could think of lots of things that made you free, but work wasn’t one of them: after five minutes in Dachau, death seemed a better bet.

They marched us to an open square which was a kind of parade ground, flanked to the south by a long building with a high-pitched roof. To the north, and running between seemingly endless rows of prison huts, was a wide, straight road lined with tall poplar trees. My heart sank as I began to appreciate the full magnitude of the task that lay before me. Dachau was huge. It might take months even to find Mutschmann, let alone befriend him convincingly enough to learn where he had hidden the papers. I was beginning to doubt whether the whole exercise simply wasn’t the grossest piece of sadism on Heydrich’s part.

The KZ commander came out of the long hut to welcome us. Like everybody in Bavaria, he had a lot to learn about hospitality. Mostly he had punishments on offer. He said that there were more than enough good trees around to hang every one of us. He finished by promising us hell, and I didn’t doubt that he would be as good as his word. But at least there was fresh air. That’s one of the two things you can say for Bavaria: the other has something to do with the size of their women’s breasts.

They had the quaintest little tailor’s shop at Dachau. And a barber’s shop. I found a nice off-the-peg in stripes, a pair of clogs, and then had a haircut. I’d have asked for some oil on it but that would have meant pouring it on the floor. Things started to look up when I got three blankets, which was an improvement on Columbia, and was assigned to an Aryan hut. This was quarters for 150 men. Jewish huts contained three times that number.

It was true what they said: there’s always somebody else who is worse off than you. That is, unless you were unfortunate enough to be Jewish. The Jewish population in Dachau was never large, but in all respects Jews were the worst off. Except maybe the questionable means of attaining freedom. In an Aryan hut the death rate was one per night; in a Jewish hut it was nearer seven or eight.

Dachau was no place to be a Jew.

Generally the prisoners reflected the complete spectrum of opposition to the Nazis, not to mention those against whom the Nazis were themselves implacably hostile. There were Sozis and Kozis, trade unionists, judges, lawyers, doctors, school teachers, army officers. Republican soldiers from the Spanish Civil War, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Freemasons, Catholic priests, gypsies, Jews, spiritualists, homosexuals, vagrants, thieves and murderers. With the exception of some Russians, and a few former members of the Austrian cabinet, everyone in Dachau was German. I met a convict who was a Jew. He was also a homosexual. And if that weren’t enough, he was also a communist. That made three triangles. His luck hadn’t so much run out as jumped on a fucking motorcycle.

Twice a day we had to assemble at the Appellplatz for Parade, and after roll-call came the Hindenburg Alms—floggings. They fastened the man or woman to a block and gave you an average of twenty-five on the bare arse. I saw several shit themselves during a beating. The first time I was ashamed for them; but after that someone told me it was the best way you had of spoiling the concentration of the man wielding the whip.

Parade was my best chance for looking at all the other prisoners. I kept a mental log of those men I had eliminated, and within a month I had succeeded in ruling out over 300 men.

I never forget a face. That’s one of the things that makes you a good bull, and one of the things that had prompted me to join the force in the first place. Only this time my life depended on it. But always there were newcomers to upset my methodology. I felt like Hercules trying to clean the shit out of the Aegean stables.

How do you describe the indescribable? How can you talk about something that made you mute with horror? There were many more articulate than me who were simply unable to find the words. It is a silence born of shame, for even the guiltless are guilty. Shorn of all human rights, man reverts back to the animal. The starving steal from the starving, and personal survival is the only consideration, which overrides, even censors, the experience. Work sufficient to destroy the human spirit was the aim of Dachau, with death the unlooked-for by-product. Survival was through the vicarious suffering of others: you were safe for a while when it was another man who was being beaten or lynched; for a few days you might eat the ration of the man in the next cot after he had expired in his sleep.

To stay alive it is first necessary to die a little.

Soon after my arrival at Dachau I was put in charge of a Jewish work-company building a workshop on the northwestern corner of the compound. This involved filling handcarts with rocks weighing anything up to thirty kilos and pushing them up the hill out of the quarry and to the building site, a distance of several hundred metres. Not all the S S in Dachau were bastards: some of them were comparatively moderate and managed to make money by running small businesses on the side, using the cheap labour and pool of skills that the KZ provided, so it was in their interest not to work the prisoners to death. But the S S supervising the building site were real bastards. Mostly Bavarian peasants, formerly unemployed, theirs was a less refined type of sadism than that which had been practised by their urban counterparts at Columbia. But it was just as effective. Mine was an easy job: as company leader I was not required myself to shift the blocks of stone; but for the Jews working in my kommando it was back-breaking work all the way. The S S were always setting deliberately tight schedules for the completion of a foundation, or a wall, and failure to meet the schedule meant no food or water. Those who collapsed through exhaustion were shot where they fell.

At first I took a hand myself, and the guards found this hugely amusing; and it was not as if the work grew any lighter as a result of my participation. One of them said to me:

‘What, are you a Jew-lover or something? I don’t get it. You don’t have to help them, so why do you bother?’

For a moment I had no answer. Then I said: ‘You don’t get it. That’s why I have to bother.’

He looked rather puzzled, and then frowned. For a moment I thought he was going to take offence, but instead he just laughed and said: ‘Well, it’s your fucking funeral.’

After a while I realized that he was right. The heavy work was killing me, just like it was killing the Jews in my kommando. And so I stopped. Feeling ashamed, I helped a convict who had collapsed, hiding him under a couple of empty handcarts until he had sufficiently recovered to continue working. And I kept on doing it, although I knew I was risking a flogging. There were informers everywhere in Dachau. The other convicts warned me about them, which seemed ironic since I was half way to being one myself.

I wasn’t caught in the act of hiding a Jew who had collapsed, but they started questioning me about it, so I had to assume I’d been fingered, just like I’d been warned. I was sentenced to twenty-five strokes.

I didn’t dread the pain so much as I dreaded being sent to the camp hospital after my punishment. Since the majority of its patients were suffering from dysentery and typhoid, it was a place to avoid at all costs. Even the SS never went there. It would be easy, I thought, to catch something and get sick. Then I might never find Mutschmann.

Parade seldom lasted longer than one hour, but on the morning of my punishment it was more like three.

They strapped me to the whipping frame and pulled down my trousers. I tried to shit myself, but the pain was so bad that I couldn’t concentrate enough to do it. Not only that, but there was nothing to shit. When I’d collected my alms they untied me, and for a moment I stood free of the frame before I fainted.

For a long time I stared at the man’s hand which dangled over the edge of the cot above me. It never moved, not even a twitch of fingers, and I wondered if he were dead. Feeling unaccountably impelled to get up and look at him I raised myself up off my stomach and yelled with pain. My cry summoned a man to the side of my cot.

‘Jesus,’ I gasped, feeling the sweat start out on my forehead. ‘It hurts worse now than it did out there.’

‘That’s the medicine, I’m afraid.’ The man was about forty, rabbit-toothed, and with hair that he’d probably borrowed from an old mattress. He was terribly emaciated, with the kind of body that looked as though it belonged properly in a jar of formaldehyde, and there was a yellow star sewn to his prison jacket.

‘Medicine?’ There was a loud note of incredulity in my voice as I spoke.

‘Yes,’ drawled the Jew. ‘Sodium chloride.’ And then more briskly: ‘Common salt to you, my friend. I’ve covered your stripes with it.’

‘Good God,’ I said. ‘I’m not a fucking omelette.’

‘That may be so,’ he said, ‘but I am a fucking doctor. It stings like a condom full of nettles, I know, but it’s about the only thing I can prescribe that will stop the weals going septic.’ His voice was round and fruity, like a funny actor’s.

‘You’re lucky. You I can fix. I wish I could say the same for the rest of these poor bastards. Unfortunately there’s only so much that one can do with a dispensary that’s been stolen from a cookhouse.’

I looked up at the bunk above me, and the wrist which dangled over the edge. Never had there been an occasion when I had looked upon human deformity with such pleasure. It was a right wrist with a ganglion. The doctor lifted it out of my sight, and stood on my cot to check on its owner. Then he climbed down again, and looked at my bare arse.

‘You’ll do,’ he said.

I jerked my head upwards. ‘What’s wrong with him?’

‘Why, has he been giving you trouble?’

‘No, I just wondered.’

‘Tell me, have you had jaundice?’

‘Yes.’

‘Good,’ he said. ‘Don’t worry, you won’t catch it. Just don’t kiss him or try to fuck him. All the same, I’ll see that he’s moved onto another bunk, in case he pisses on you. Transmission is through excretory products.’

‘Transmission?’ I said. ‘Of what?’

‘Hepatitis. I’ll get them to put you on the top bunk and him on the bottom. You can give him some water if he gets thirsty.’

‘Sure,’ I said. ‘What’s his name?’

The doctor sighed wearily. ‘I really haven’t the faintest idea.’

Later on, when, with a considerable degree of discomfort, I had been moved by the medical orderlies on to the bunk above, and its previous occupant had been moved below, I looked down over the edge of my pallet at the man who represented my only way out of Dachau. It was not an encouraging sight. From my memory of the photograph in Heydrich’s office, it would have been impossible to identify Mutschmann but for the ganglion, so yellow was his pallor and so wasted his body. He lay shivering under his blanket, delirious with fever, occasionally groaning with pain as cramp racked his insides. I watched him for a while and to my relief he recovered consciousness, but only long enough to try, unsuccessfully, to vomit. Then he was away again. It was clear to me that Mutschmann was dying.

Apart from the doctor, whose name was Mendelssohn, and three or four medical orderlies, who were themselves suffering from a variety of ailments, there were about sixty men and women in the camp hospital. As hospitals went it was little more than a charnel-house. I learned that there were only two kinds of patient: the sick, who always died, and the injured, who sometimes also got sick.

That evening, before it grew dark, Mendelssohn came to inspect my stripes.

‘In the morning I’ll wash your back and put some more salt on,’ he said. Then he glanced disinterestedly down below at Mutschmann.

‘What about him?’ I said. It was a stupid question, and only served to arouse the Jew’s curiosity. His eyes narrowed as he looked at me.

‘Since you ask, I’ve told him to keep off alcohol, spicy food and to get plenty of rest,’ he said drily.

‘I think I get the picture.’

‘I’m not a callous man, my friend, but there is nothing I can do to help him. With a high-protein diet, vitamins, glucose and methionine, he might have had a chance.’

‘How long has he got?’

‘He still manages to recover consciousness from time to time?’ I nodded. Mendelssohn sighed. ‘Difficult to say. But once coma has set in, a matter of a day or so. I don’t even have any morphine to give him. In this clinic death is the usual cure that is available to patients.’

‘I’ll bear it in mind.’

‘Don’t get sick, my friend. There’s typhus here. The minute you find yourself developing a fever, take two spoonfuls of your own urine. It does seem to work.’

‘If I can find a clean spoon, I’ll do just that. Thanks for the tip.’

‘Well, here’s another, since you’re in such a good mood. The only reason that the Camp Committee meets here is because they know the guards won’t come unless they absolutely have to. Contrary to outward appearances, the SS are not stupid. Only a madman would stay here for any longer than he has to.

‘As soon as you can get about without too much pain, my advice to you is to get yourself out of here.’

‘What makes you stay? Hippocratic oath?’

Mendelssohn shrugged. ‘Never heard of it,’ he said.

I slept for a while. I had meant to stay awake and watch Mutschmann in case he came round again. I suppose I was hoping for one of those touching little scenes that you see in the movies, when the dying man is moved to unburden his soul to the man crouching over his deathbed.

When I awoke it was dark, and above the sound of the other inmates of the hospital coughing, and snoring, I heard the unmistakeable sound, coming from the cot underneath, of Mutschmann retching. I leaned over and saw him in the moonlight, leaning on one elbow, clutching his stomach.

‘You all right?’ I said.

‘Sure,’ he wheezed. ‘Like a fucking Galapagos tortoise, I’m going to live for ever.’ He groaned again, and painfully, through clenched teeth, said: ‘It’s these damned stomach cramps.’

‘Would you like some water?’

‘Water, yes. My tongue is as dry as—’ He was overcome by another fit of retching. I climbed down gingerly, and fetched the ladle from a bucket near the bed. Mutschmann, his teeth chattering like a telegraph button, drank the water noisily. When he’d finished he sighed and lay back.

‘Thanks, friend,’ he said.

‘Don’t mention it,’ I said. ‘You’d do the same for me.’

I heard him cough his way through what sounded like a chuckle. ‘No I fucking wouldn’t,’ he rasped. ‘I’d be afraid of catching something, whatever it is that I’ve got. I don’t suppose you know, do you?’

I thought for a moment. Then I told him. ‘You’ve got hepatitis.’

He was silent for a couple of minutes, and I felt ashamed. I ought to have spared him that agony. ‘Thanks for being honest with me,’ he said. ‘What’s up with you?’

‘Hindenburg Alms.’

‘What for?’

‘Helped a Jew in my work kommando.’

‘That was stupid,’ he said. ‘They’re all dead anyway. Risk it for someone who’s got half a chance, but not for a Jew. Their luck is long gone.’

‘Well, yours didn’t exactly win the lottery.’

He laughed. ‘True enough,’ he said. ‘I never figured on going sick. I thought I was going to get through this fuck-hole. I had a good job in the cobbler’s shop.’

‘It’s a tough break,’ I admitted.

‘I’m dying, aren’t I?’ he said.

‘That’s not what the doc says.’

‘No need to give me the cold cabbage. I can see it in the lead. But thanks anyway. Jesus, I’d give anything for a nail.’

‘Me too,’ I said.

‘Even a roll up would do.’ He paused. Then he said: ‘There’s something I’ve got to tell you.’

I tried to conceal the urgency that was crowding my voice-box. ‘Yes? What’s that then?’

‘Don’t fuck any of the women in this camp. I’m pretty sure that’s how I got sick.’

‘No, I won’t. Thanks for telling me.’

The next day I sold my food ration for some cigarettes, and waited for Mutschmann to come out of his delirium. It lasted most of the day. When eventually he regained consciousness he spoke to me as if our previous conversation had been only a few minutes earlier.

‘How’s it going? ‘How are the stripes?’

‘Painful,’ I said, getting off my bunk.

‘I’ll bet. That bastard sergeant with the whip really lays it on like fuck.’ He inclined his emaciated face towards me, and said: ‘You know, it seems to me that I’ve seen you somewhere.’

‘Well now, let’s see,’ I said. ‘The Rot Weiss Tennis Club? The Herrenklub? The Excelsior, maybe?’

‘You’re putting me on.’ I lit one of the cigarettes and put it between his lips.

‘I’ll bet it was at the Opera—I’m a big fan, you know. Or perhaps it was at Goering’s wedding?’ His thin yellow lips stretched into something like a smile. Then he breathed in the tobacco smoke as if it was pure oxygen.

‘You are a fucking magician,’ he said, savouring the cigarette. I took it from his lips for a second before putting it back again. ‘No, it wasn’t any of those places. It’ll come to me.’

‘Sure it will,’ I said, earnestly hoping that it wouldn’t. For a moment I thought of saying Tegel Prison, but rejected it. Sick or not, he might remember differently, and then I’d be finished with him.

‘What are you? Sozi? Kozi?’

‘Black-marketeer,’ I said. ‘How about you?’

The smile stretched so that it was almost a rictus. ‘I’m hiding.’

‘Here? From whom?’

‘Everyone,’ he said.

‘Well, you sure picked one hell of a hiding place. What are you, crazy?’

‘Nobody can find me here,’ he said. ‘Let me ask you something: where would you hide a raindrop?’ I looked puzzled until he answered, ‘Under a waterfall. In case you didn’t know it, that’s Chinese philosophy. I mean, you’d never find it, would you?’

‘No, I suppose not. But you must have been desperate,’ I said.

‘Getting sick . . . was just unlucky . . . But for that I’d have been out . . . in a year or so . . . by which time . . . they’d have given up looking.’

‘Who would?’ I said. ‘What are they after you for?’

His eyelids flickered, and the cigarette fell from his unconscious lips and onto the blanket. I drew it up to his chin and tapped out the cigarette in the hope that he might come round again for long enough to smoke the other half.

During the night, Mutschmann’s breathing grew shallower, and in the morning Mendelssohn pronounced that he was on the edge of coma. There was nothing that I could do but lie on my stomach and look down and wait. I thought of Inge a lot, but mostly I thought about myself. At Dachau, the funeral arrangements were simple: they burned you in the crematorium and that was it. End of story. But as I watched the poisons work their dreadful effect on Kurt Mutschmann, destroying his liver and his spleen so that his whole body was filled with infection, mostly my thoughts were of my Fatherland and its own equally appalling sickness. It was only now, in Dachau, that I was able to judge just how much Germany’s atrophy had become necrosis; and as with poor Mutschmann, there wasn’t going to be any morphine for when the pain grew worse.

There were a few children in Dachau, born to women imprisoned there. Some of them had never known any other life than the camp. They played freely in the compound, tolerated by all the guards, and even liked by some, and they could go almost anywhere, with the exception of the hospital barrack. The penalty for disobedience was a severe beating.

Mendelssohn was hiding a child with a broken leg under one of the cots. The boy had fallen while playing in the prison quarry, and had been there for almost three days with his leg in a splint when the S S came for him. He was so scared he swallowed his tongue and choked to death.

When the dead boy’s mother came to see him and had to be told the bad news, Mendelssohn was the very model of professional sympathy. But later on, when she had gone, I heard him weeping quietly to himself.

‘Hey, up there.’ I gave a start as I heard the voice below me. It wasn’t that I’d been asleep; I just hadn’t been watching Mutschmann as I should have been. Now I had no idea of the invaluable period of time for which he had been conscious. I climbed down carefully and knelt by his cot. It was still too painful to sit on my backside. He grinned terribly and gripped my arm.

‘I remembered,’ he said.

‘Oh yes?’ I said hopefully. ‘And what did you remember?’

‘Where I seen your face.’ I tried to appear unconcerned, although my heart was thumping in my chest. If he thought that I was a bull then I could forget it. An ex-convict never befriends a bull. It could have been the two of us washed away on some desert island, and he would still have spat in my face.

‘Oh?’ I said nonchalantly. ‘Where was that, then?’ I put his half-smoked cigarette between his lips and lit it.

‘You used to be the house-detective,’ he croaked. ‘At the Adlon. I once cased the place to do a job.’ He chuckled hoarsely. ‘Am I right?’

‘You’ve got a good memory,’ I said, lighting one myself. ‘That was quite some time ago.’

His grip tightened. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘I won’t tell anyone. Anyway, it’s not like you were a bull, is it?’

‘You said you were casing the place. What particular line of criminality were you in?’

‘I was a nutcracker.’

‘I can’t say as I recall the hotel safe ever being robbed,’ I said. ‘At least, not as long as I was working there.’

‘That’s because I didn’t take anything,’ he said proudly. ‘Oh, I opened it all right. But there was nothing worth taking. Seriously.’

‘I’ve only got your word for that,’ I said. ‘There were always rich people at the hotel, and they always had valuables. It was very rare that there wasn’t something in that safe.’

‘It’s true,’ he said. ‘Just my bad luck. There really was nothing that I could take that I could ever have got rid of. That’s the point, you see. There’s no point in taking something you can’t shift.’

‘All right, I believe you,’ I said.

‘I’m not boasting,’ he said. ‘I was the best. There wasn’t anything I couldn’t crack. Here, I bet you’d expect me to be rich, wouldn’t you?’

I shrugged. ‘Perhaps. I’d also expect you to be in prison, which you are.’

‘It’s because I am rich that I’m hiding here,’ he said. ‘I told you that, didn’t I?’

‘You mentioned something about that, yes.’ I took my time before I added: ‘And what have you got that makes you so rich and wanted? Money? Jewels?’

He croaked another short laugh. ‘Better than that,’ he said. ‘Power.’

‘In what shape or form?’

‘Papers,’ he said. ‘Take my word for it, there’s an awful lot of people who’d pay big money to get their hands on what I’ve got.’

‘What’s in these papers?’

His breathing was shallower than a Der Junggeselle cover-girl.

‘I don’t know exactly,’ he said. ‘Names, addresses, information. But you’re a clever sort of fellow, you could work it.’

‘You haven’t got them here, have you?’

‘Don’t be stupid,’ he wheezed. ‘They’re safe, on the outside.’ I took the dead cigarette from his mouth and threw it onto the floor. Then I gave him the rest of mine.

‘It’d be a shame . . . for it never to be used,’ he said breathlessly. ‘You’ve been good . . . to me. So I’m going to do you a favour. . . . Make ’em sweat, won’t you? This’ll be worth . . . a lorry load . . . of gravel . . . to you . . . on the outside.’ I bent forwards to hear him speak. ‘Pick ‘em up . . . by the nose.’ His eyelids flickered. I took him by the shoulders and tried to shake him back to consciousness.

Back to life.

I knelt there by him for some time. In the small corner of me that still felt things, there was a terrible and terrifying sense of abandonment. Mutschmann had been younger than I was, and strong, too. It wasn’t too difficult to imagine myself succumbing to illness. I had lost a lot of weight, I had bad ringworms and my teeth felt loose in their gums. Heydrich’s man, S S Oberschutze Bürger, was in charge of the carpenter’s shop, and I wondered what would happen to me if I went ahead and gave him the code-word that would get me out of Dachau. What would Heydrich do to me when he discovered that I didn’t know where Von Greis’s papers were? Send me back? Have me executed? and If I didn’t blow the whistle, would it even occur to him to assume that I had been unsuccessful and that he should get me out? From my short meeting with Heydrich, and what little I had heard of him, it seemed unlikely. To have got so near and failed at the last was almost more than I could bear.

After a while I reached forwards and drew the blanket over Mutschmann’s yellow face. A short stub of a pencil fell onto the floor, and I looked at it for several seconds before a thought crossed my mind and a glint of hope once more shone in my heart. I drew the blanket back from Mutschmann’s body. The hands were tightly bunched into fists. One after the other I prised them open. In Mutschmann’s left hand was a piece of brown paper of the sort that the prisoners in the cobbler’s shop used to wrap shoe repairs for the S S guards in. I was too afraid of there being nothing to open the paper immediately. As it was, the writing was almost illegible, and it took me almost an hour to decipher the note’s contents. It said, ‘Lost property office, Berlin Traffic Dept. Saarlandstr. You lost briefcase sometime July on Leipzigerstr. Made of plain brown hide, with brass lock, ink-stain on handle. Gold initials K.M. Contains postcard from America. Western novel, Old Surehand, Karl May and business papers. Thanks. K.M.’

It was perhaps the strangest ticket home that anyone ever had.