Black Camp 21 Read online

  But it was already too late. In its death throes, Alize’s photograph twisted in the American’s hands, pluming acid fumes along the length of his arm. As the flames reached his fingers, he tossed the fragments to the floor.

  ‘How does it feel to be a humiliated by a nigger speaking your language?’

  Two pairs of hands held Hartmann back, but the fight was soon gone. As his exhausted body sagged, he slid sideways. A few glowing wisps still hovered briefly above the table and the silver cigarette case had vanished.

  ‘You’ll see what you want to see,’ he mumbled. ‘I can’t change that.’

  ‘A very dangerous man is what I see.’

  Hartmann looked up. ‘And burning that photograph is the start of my rehabilitation?’

  Somewhere, a mess tent bell was ringing, blown across the camp by a mild evening breeze. Arc lights were popping on, powered by mobile generators. Every prisoner would need to be interviewed. Darkness wouldn’t be allowed to stand in the way. The process would continue all night.

  ‘The thing is, Hartmann, I’ve got to make a decision about you.’

  A few scattered fires had been lit inside the enclosure. Tubes of smoke were bending inland on the wind.

  ‘When you leave this desk you’ll be classified by a colour: white, grey or black. The whites are the good guys, the conscripts; the sweet guys who probably feel guilty when their lice get zapped; the ones who wished this war had never started. The greys are the soft-in-the-middle guys. The ones who didn’t mind joining up, but who sure as hell don’t care that it’s finished. And then there’s the blacks: the bad guys, the killers; the nasty ones who won’t stop until they’re stopped. And guess what, Max Hartmann?’

  ‘Surprise me.’

  The sergeant had picked up his pen but his eyes were back on his papers. ‘I guess both of us are black men now, soldier. Next.’

  Hartmann felt a hand on his back and he was pushed through the gate into the pen.

  At first it was hard to make things out. There were no lights, only a handful of fires coughing bitter fumes but giving no illumination. Almost every tree in the compound had been stripped and burned. Here and there, a match would strike and a spectral face would blink across the gloom. Everything else was hidden. Sleeping men lay everywhere, cocooned in their trench coats. Others stood in anonymous huddles, collars hunched, giving way reluctantly as Hartmann inched deeper into the crowd. As his eyes adjusted he could make out faces, but none he recognised, or expected to.

  Some watched him intensely. Most turned away from his uniform. The American had been right, Hartmann realised. He was a black man now.

  For what remained of the night, he hunched down close to the perimeter wire. On either side of him, dark shapes grunted and shuffled aside. The smell of human waste seemed horribly close, but he was too weary to investigate, or to care, or even to sleep. Nothing beyond his present nightmare seemed real any longer. The only tangible link to his former life had been incinerated.

  When it arrived, the early daylight was a relief, bringing light drizzle out of an uncertain sky. Although the pain in his ribs was excruciating, Hartmann had surprised himself by drifting off into a dreamless stupor for a few hours.

  Just a few paces away, a line of men was forming by a cluster of buckets. Most were already overflowing with excrement, and those that were not soon would be. Every now and then, in desperation, a prisoner would rip down his trousers and defecate in the grass.

  ‘Horrible, isn’t it?’ From deep within his coat, the crouched huddle to his left had spoken. ‘It only takes a few days and we’re animals again.’

  A man’s head was appearing. The voice was acquiring a face.

  ‘Unless you accept the view – which seems common among our American friends – that we were animals to begin with.’

  He was an older man – in his mid-thirties – and not a fighter either. Even in the dawn grey, his uniform appeared kempt, and the two eyes he’d fixed on Hartmann bulged disturbingly behind the thick lenses of his spectacles. Like everyone else, he was unshaven, but the effect felt contrived; as if the stubble – like the parting dividing his sleek black hair – was an affectation; part of a look engineered for effect, to be maintained whatever the circumstances. When he spoke, the voice was cultured and measured, and his words, which were studiously neutral, emerged from a face that was fleshy and well fed.

  ‘Don’t be fooled by the wire. We’re no safer inside this cage than we were outside it.’

  Over by the pails, a prisoner was weeping. His own dirt was on his outstretched hands.

  ‘If they don’t move us soon, we’ll be dropping like flies. Cholera, typhoid. It’s what happens when you put thousands of men in a cage without a toilet. On the other hand, we might be killing ourselves before too long.’

  Hartmann followed the stranger’s curious eyes across his grey uniform to the lapel.

  ‘Schutzstaffel. You should feel at home. There really are some very bad people in here, very bad indeed.’

  Finally, Hartmann felt moved to respond. ‘I’m a black prisoner, apparently. You’d better be careful.’

  More people around them were waking up. A fight had broken out over by the buckets. One man was down. Two others were kicking his head. A little warmth was beginning to trickle out of the sky. It felt good to Hartmann to be having a conversation.

  ‘You don’t look dangerous,’ said the stranger, peering out at the crowd. ‘But then who does any more?’

  ‘Actually I’m not really sure I ever was.’ Hartmann forced himself to turn, and extended a hand. ‘My name is Hartmann, by the way. Max. Do I assume that you’re a very bad person too?’

  ‘Excellent. Yes. I think that’s where all lasting relationships should start: with doubt and suspicion.’ The heavy glasses had slipped along his nose, exposing small, dark eyes. ‘But as to whether it is true, I must let others be the judge of that.’

  He was Wolfgang Rosterg. He was thirty-four years old, and like Hartmann he spoke near-perfect English. Before the war, he’d worked for two years in London. And before that, he’d travelled and worked all over Europe, picking up fluent Polish and French along the way.

  ‘You’re rather old for war,’ said Hartmann. ‘And talented.’

  ‘I am. Both. Thank you. All the more reason to ensure that I win it.’

  Back in Berlin, his home was a nineteenth-century villa on the city’s outskirts, where – he presumed – his wife and three children were still living. ‘There’s a very deep wine cellar and we’re a long way from any obvious targets,’ he told Hartmann. ‘They’ll go down and get drunk when they have to.’

  For four years his work had kept him beyond the fighting until 1943, when he’d felt compelled to enlist with the Wehrmacht. Now, like almost everyone else, he was wondering what happened next. ‘I still thought we’d win when I joined up. Bad decision.’

  ‘No one else did. Not by then. Apart from Goebbels.’

  ‘Yes, but I’m not like you, Hartmann. I’m just a soldier. A Feldwebel – a staff sergeant who hung around out of gunshot range and made sure you lot got ammunition, fuel and food.’

  ‘You look well on it.’

  ‘I like a good meal. That didn’t make me bad at my job. And the French are fine cooks.’

  Two jeeps full of American soldiers were checking the fence. A solitary Hurricane was flying low over the camp. ‘So you’re a category white prisoner?’

  ‘No, I’m a black actually.’

  Hartmann looked puzzled. ‘Me, I understand. Why you?’

  ‘I’m not entirely sure. When they questioned me they seemed more interested in my job before the war.’

  ‘And that was?’

  ‘My father is a manager with an industrial chemicals firm. I. G. Farben.’

  ‘I’ve heard of them. But why would that even matter?’

  ‘I work for them too. It’s what kept me out of the war and got me around Europe.’

  ‘I still don’t understand.�
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  ‘Nor me, really. It’s a huge company and my father is a good Nazi, if you like. He uses slave labour, Jew labour, to make pesticides. Zyklon B. We’ve got factories in Poland. That’s what I was selling when I lived in Britain. I told them all this out there at the gate. They seemed interested.’

  Rosterg fell silent. He pushed his spectacles back over his eyes and focused on Hartmann. ‘We’re killing people out there, in the east. You must know that. They’ve seen photographs of camps.’

  ‘And Zyklon B?’

  ‘Is a very effective killer of parasites.’ He paused again. ‘And for some reason, they think I’m a criminal. Or the child of one. So I’m a black. Just like you.’

  Hartmann didn’t ask any more questions. The man unsettled him. Something wasn’t quite right. If Rosterg was lying – which he might be – he didn’t really care, or understand.

  If he was telling the truth, it would be better not to know.

  6

  While the two men had been talking, the camp had woken up. In the chilly half-light, men were stamping the blood back into their feet, and as the sun fought back, the early rain vaporised on sodden coats.

  A sullen army of beaten soldiers was standing in its own smell.

  Hartmann rose to his feet and shivered. From deep inside his stomach, he felt the forgotten tug of hunger. The last food he’d tasted had been in a hospital tent.

  ‘What do we eat?’

  ‘This way. It’s not safe for you here.’

  Rosterg led off along the fence. Close to the gate, Hartmann could see the still-feverish line of desks and the delousing station. Beyond them, hundreds – maybe thousands – more prisoners were jostling towards their turn. A little further on, the two men cut back deep into the compound where snaking queues were forming along tracks worn down into the field. Watched by sleepy guards, Red Cross volunteers had set up long trestle tables. At the end of each one, watery porridge was being slopped out into tin mugs. Further along each table there was bread and cheese and what looked like tinned meat.

  Hartmann’s hunger rolled over in his belly. To feed so many men would take all day. It could be hours before food passed his lips.

  ‘This way, Max. You’ll eat, I promise you.’

  As they inched nearer the back of the compound, the ground rose slightly. Here, the stumps of a few trees had survived, between which tarpaulins had been hung for cover. Along one edge of the fence, a narrow stream ran weakly through trampled grass. Clean, fresh water. Damp wood hissed hopelessly in a fire pit around which a handful of men sat in mute expectation. Some were smoking cigarettes. All of them had food. He could smell coffee and hear laughter.

  ‘These are the authentic bad boys, Max,’ said Rosterg.

  He hadn’t needed telling. Every uniform on the knoll was SS, and Hartmann could feel the cold stares of the ordinary soldiers as he threaded his way through them.

  ‘No one can see inside your head. It’s what you’re wearing on your collar that counts. Never forget that,’ said Rosterg. ‘I can move freely around the compound because I’m clean. I’m Wehrmacht. But from now on, you should stay up here. We’ll all be shipped out pretty soon anyway.’

  In the corner, where the fence turned, an oil-stained square of canvas had been spiked back to the barbed wire to form a shelter. Beneath it, a dozen men were chatting loudly. Among them he could make out Zuhlsdorff, with his arm still strapped in a bloodied sling.

  A tall figure with a square face was peeling off from the larger group.

  ‘Who have you found now, Rosterg?’

  With a theatrical bow, the Feldwebel ushered his new companion forward. ‘Yet another recruit for your congregation of righteousness, Herr Goltz.’

  ‘He’s called Max Hartmann. I know him.’ Zuhlsdorff had stepped forward, holding up his mutilated fingers with a grin. ‘He turned our tanks away from the front. It’s his fault I’m a cripple and a prisoner.’

  The one called Goltz extended his hand. Up close, Hartmann could see that he had no eyebrows, and that his hair was completely white.

  ‘Not true, I’m sure. The boy has some sort of fever, perhaps.’ The man was like a living ghost. His skin was pale and his pearl-coloured eyes seemed in constant movement. ‘It’s an affliction, a very mild one. I compensate for it in other ways.’

  For an uncomfortable moment, Hartmann clasped the offered hand. ‘I didn’t mean to stare. I’m sorry.’

  ‘Don’t be. If they’re feeling brave, people tell me I look like a corpse. But really I’m Joachim Goltz. Unteroffizier. Twelfth Panzers. Very much alive. You want food?’

  Nineteen years old at most, Hartmann guessed. An albino, maybe. Or near enough. The ultimate Aryan. The only eyes he’d ever seen like that before had been those of a husky.

  ‘You can’t possibly know how badly. Thanks. And a cigarette maybe?’

  Zuhlsdorff was still hovering nearby. From his trouser pocket, he unearthed a fresh blue packet and a bar of Hershey’s chocolate. Hartmann seized it gratefully and ripped off the paper.

  ‘That is so good. How did you get it?’

  ‘We trade. We steal. People want our clean water.’

  ‘Your clean water?’

  ‘You can go now, Zuhlsdorff. Goodbye.’ With a hand on his shoulder, Goltz steered Hartmann under the cover of the canvas awning. ‘Sorry, but I try to keep out of the sun. And Zuhlsdorff can be rather annoying.’

  ‘You’ve noticed.’

  ‘Light?’ The two men sat down, and Hartmann leaned in to the flame of a metal lighter. ‘What he said isn’t true, is it?’

  ‘It looks easy when you don’t have to make the decisions. No, it isn’t true. We did what damage we could. We were captured. Everyone here was captured.’

  ‘That’s true,’ said Goltz. ‘And yet these Americans still seem a little afraid of us.’

  For a few seconds, Hartmann’s head was spinning. The rush from the tobacco had overpowered the sugar, and the hordes in the distance fused into a single green blur.

  ‘How long have you been here?’ he asked.

  ‘Four days. It seems the most time people spend here is five.’

  ‘And after that?’

  ‘We think America.’ Goltz took the cigarette from Hartmann’s hand and inhaled. ‘Look at them all down there. Toerags. Cowards. Traitors. Most of them couldn’t wait to surrender. But who the fuck’s told them the war’s over?’

  Hartmann remained silent, his eyes locked on the swimming mass of prisoners. Gradually, the stockade had come back into focus, but his thoughts had not. He wanted to be sick, and Goltz’s eyes were probing him like needles.

  ‘Of course, the senior officers are kept apart. Somewhere else. Don’t know where. Soon, I expect, they’ll try to separate SS from Wehrmacht.’

  Hartmann looked genuinely surprised.

  ‘You’re wondering why? It’s simple. So long as the Wehrmacht boys can see us up here, they’ll never completely relax. Never quite give up the war.’

  ‘So the Americans won’t relax until we’re separated?’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘And where does Rosterg fit into this? He’s Wehrmacht, isn’t he?’

  ‘Ears and eyes, Max. Ears and eyes.’

  All the next day, Hartmann kept his head down. Exhaustion was common among new arrivals and everyone could see he’d put up a fight. The purple bruises around his eyes were proof of that, and no one questioned his detachment. When he wasn’t asleep, he rested back against a fencepost and watched.

  Rosterg had been right. The camp had split itself in two.

  On the lower ground, around two thousand soldiers milled in amorphous knots. Looking down on them from their privileged corner, a couple of hundred SS wrestled with their own frustrations under the glacial scrutiny of their self-elected leader Joachim Goltz. It wasn’t difficult to explain his pre-eminence. At least four people had told Hartmann the legend already.

  Like Hartmann, Goltz had fought in Russia, but when he took his ta
nk into battle at Kursk, Goltz had barely been eighteen. By the time he got home, he was a war hero, a wholesale killer and an SSScharführer with a chest of medals and a handshake from Hitler.

  If the stories were true, he’d destroyed twenty-two Soviet tanks in an hour. He’d also acquired a chilling hauteur well suited to his colourless features, his disarming eloquence and his steady rise through the ranks. As capture loomed in France, he’d apparently closed the hatch on his tank, removed the pin from a stick grenade and clutched it to his chest. Two minutes later, when it hadn’t gone off, he was dragged into captivity screaming vile Teutonic obscenities at the Americans whose comrades he had been routinely slaughtering for weeks.

  Through half-closed eyes, Hartmann used his time to observe the teenager’s operation. It certainly wasn’t Goltz’s physical strength that drew people around him. Close up, he looked like a consumptive weakling and it was only when he spoke that his presence exuded authentic danger, the promise of which ensured a constant circle of disciples. Whenever he whispered an instruction – or handed down an opinion – everyone stopped to listen. Most of the time, however, no one did very much at all.

  It was like sitting in a cage full of buzzards.

  Virtually nothing could happen in the compound without Goltz’s knowing. Sheltered only by the August sky, private conversations were impossible, and the place was overrun by informants who’d concluded that the SS were a threat they couldn’t ignore. Dissent and disloyalty were to be rooted out and punished. Defeatism was a heresy. Anyone who deviated from absolute trust in the Führer was at risk.

  Wearily, Hartmann tried to remember what he’d said to Rosterg; too much, probably. Be very careful, Max, he thought. We are turning on ourselves. They will be watching you too.

  It was almost dark when he awoke. Even in the thinning light, he could see that the camp’s population had been swelling all day. Now, no open ground was visible, and the food queues – if there were any – had been swallowed by the crush. From a distance, the rise and fall of so many heads was hypnotic. Beyond the main gate, the arc lights had clicked back on. He could hear the generators ticking, and periodically a shot rang out above the noise. Keeping order, he presumed. Another red line drawn through a name on a list.