She looked around her in bewilderment. ‘You don’t mean it. You cannot mean it!’

  ‘I repeat, they all die.’

  ‘Then I don’t want to live,’ she said, her voice rising. ‘I’ll die too!’

  There was now a very real possibility that she would try to warn the other Jews. If she did that, I would have no choice but to shoot her dead, and the thought of that was insupportable. I reached out and grabbed her arm, squeezing it so hard she winced in pain. ‘No you won’t. You will live so that your brother and sister can live.’

  She was still wavering on the edge. ‘Think of your parents,’ I insisted. ‘Would they want you dead? Stay alive for them. Please.’

  In that one last word I somehow let some fraction of my true emotion show. I could see a change in her, some recognition that I was desperate for her to survive. Perhaps she saw me as a fellow human being then, not a machine in a uniform, I don’t know.

  She snatched her arm away from me, took a few seconds to pull herself back together and then said: ‘I’ll go and tell my brother and sister to do as you say.’

  ‘But nothing else, you understand? Not a word to anyone of anything I have said. Your lives depend upon it.’

  ‘I understand.’

  ‘Good.’

  We walked back to the other two Langs. One of the men from the German detachment was gingerly clambering down from one of the wagons, ten metres or so away, trying not to jar his fifty-year-old bones. I recognized him as Fassbender, a police Watch Master from Mannheim. I called him over and told him to stand guard over the three young people. ‘They’re to remain here,’ I said. ‘If any of those Ukrainian apes tries to take them off to the vans, tell him these are my personal prisoners, whom I am holding on Gestapo business, and I’ll shoot anyone who so much as lays a finger on them.’

  The siding had all the hubbub of a busy marketplace, with the Jews as both customers and cattle. Some of them were lining up to collect their baggage receipts or handing over their valuables. Others were already climbing up into the vans. I should by now have been giving them all the prepared speech about the joys of their new life in the wide open spaces of Ostland, but I could see that some of my men were so familiar with the patter that they were spontaneously using it to encourage their passengers.

  ‘Up you get, ladies and gentlemen,’ another middle-aged policeman was saying. ‘All aboard for the farmhouse express, just waiting to take you to your fine new homes!’

  ‘Everything going well here?’ I asked the policeman.

  He gave me a broad grin, ‘Oh yes, First Lieutenant, going aboard like little lambs they are this morning!’

  ‘Excellent, carry on.’

  Finally I found von Toll. ‘Take charge here for a while,’ I told him. ‘There’s something I need to do back at the office.’

  ‘Is it anything to do with that girl I saw you talking to?’ he asked.

  ‘When we are having a drink tonight and talking man-to-man, then maybe I’ll answer that question. For now, however, I’m giving you an order, Squad Leader, and I expect it to be obeyed.’

  Von Toll stood up straight. ‘Yes, First Lieutenant!’

  ‘Then go about your business.’

  I returned to where the Langs were waiting, watched over by Fassbender. He stood to attention as I approached. ‘I’ll take these three off your hands now,’ I said. ‘But I need you to do something for me. Their name is Lang. Their luggage will have been labelled and numbered on departure. Make sure that it’s brought to my office at the KdS, unopened and with nothing missing. I intend to search it personally.’

  ‘Yes, First Lieutenant.’

  ‘Very good, then, get on with it.’

  When he’d gone, I told the Langs to follow me and led them to my car. ‘Both my driver and I are armed,’ I told them. ‘If you make the slightest hostile or rebellious move against either of us, you will be shot. Now get in the back, sit on your hands and do not move until you are specifically told to do so.’

  The youngest one, Lisl, hesitated, too frightened to do as I’d told her. Gottfried, too, was looking at the car with sullen suspicion.

  ‘It’s all right,’ Hannah told them. ‘Do what Dr Heuser has told you. Look, I’m not afraid to get in!’

  Once Hannah had led the way the others soon followed. We drove back to the Lenin House in silence. The place was half-empty, as was normal on a transport day. I took the Langs to an interrogation room, sat them down on one side of the table and took my place at the other. ‘You will speak for the family,’ I said to Hannah. ‘You other two keep quiet. First question: what kind of Jews are you? You don’t look like Jews. You do not have a Jewish family name and only one of you has a Jewish first name. Yet your papers say that you are Jews and there you were on that transport. Do you have an explanation?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Hannah. ‘The explanation is that we are not Jews. My father is …’ She hesitated for a moment and I waited for her to correct herself.

  ‘Hannah?’ asked her sister, nervously.

  ‘Is,’ said Hannah, with a particular emphasis, ‘a Roman Catholic by birth and upbringing. Both his parents are Catholic. My mother had a Catholic father, but her mother was Jewish.’

  ‘I see. So were you raised as Catholics or Jews?’

  ‘Neither. My parents are not religious. We celebrate Christmas and have Easter egg hunts in the garden, if that is what you mean. But that’s just a matter of tradition. We hardly ever go to church.’

  ‘But you were not raised as Jews?’

  ‘No!’ There was a tone of exasperation in her voice, as if she couldn’t believe I was making such a fuss over something that seemed so unimportant to her. Yet her survival was hanging in the balance with every answer she gave. ‘I told you. My parents do not believe that people should be divided by religion.’

  ‘Were they Bolsheviks, then?’ That would have been as fatal as Judaism to the Langs’ chances of survival. Far from being alarmed by the question, however, all three of them burst out laughing.

  ‘What’s so amusing?’

  ‘You’d know if you met my father,’ the boy interrupted. ‘He has no time for Bolshies. He likes his nice house and his large cars and his bottles of first-class Tokay too much for that!’

  The girls laughed again, even Hannah. For that moment she’d forgotten what I’d told her. Her parents were still alive to her and they came alive to me too, a happy, loving family, used to prosperity and status. So how had they ended up in Minsk?

  I waited for the laughter to subside. ‘Let me sum up the situation, as I see it,’ I said. ‘As I’m sure you know, in Jewish lore Judaism is passed on through the maternal line. So to a Jew, you’re Jewish. To a German, however, you are not. Your precise legal status is that of “Mischlings of the second degree”, which is to say mixed-race with one Jewish grandparent. You are not classified as Jewish unless you are married to Jews, or you have an especially undesirable appearance that marks you outwardly as a Jew, or you have a political record to show that you feel and behave as a Jew – that you are Bolsheviks, in other words. I am satisfied that none of those conditions applies. I am thus puzzled as to why you find yourself here, all the more so since you were evidently being raised as Germans, rather than Jews. In a case such as this, even your Jewish parent should not have been deported, nor your German one, of course. And yet here you are. Do you know why?’

  ‘Yes!’ said Hannah, forcefully. ‘It was that horrid man Pichler.’

  ‘And what did he do?’

  ‘Betrayed my parents!’ blurted Gottfried Lang. ‘When all Papa did was point out the mistakes he was making.’

  ‘Please, one at a time … Fräulein Lang, tell me what happened as simply as possible, without any interruptions.’

  ‘My father’s a surgeon, a very fine surgeon,’ she said. ‘As well as having a private practice, he works at the General Hospital in Vienna and teaches students from the Medical University there. As a young man, he was in the army medical corps, on the Italian Front. My mother was a nurse at the field hospital. That was how they met.’

  I held up a hand to stop her. ‘So both your parents served our allies in the Great War?’ I was used by now to seeing Jewish war veterans at the pits, but it was most irregular to have a half-Jewish woman who had served as a military nurse and her Aryan husband both sent for resettlement. I was even more curious now to discover what had happened. ‘Please carry on, Fräulein Lang.’

  ‘A couple of years ago, just after the war began, Papa had problems with a student called Pichler,’ she said. ‘He was entering the last year of his studies, but he wasn’t any good. Papa tried to help him, but Pichler wouldn’t listen. He was too lazy, and too arrogant. So Papa told him that unless he improved his standards, he would fail the course and therefore not qualify as a doctor.

  ‘Pichler was furious. He went to his father, who was high up in the Party in Vienna, with lots of influential friends. Everyone knows that Papa’s married to a woman who has a Jewish parent. So Herr Pichler used that against him. They said that unless he personally made sure that his son passed his medical exams with flying colours, he’d make sure that Mama was exposed as a Jew and Papa’s medical career was destroyed. Papa said: “No.” It wasn’t in his power to pass a student whose work was not up to standard, and even if it were, he’d never put the lives of patients at risk by letting loose an incompetent doctor upon them. Mama begged him to divorce her and make the problem go away. She was willing to sacrifice herself for the family, but Papa absolutely refused. And he said the same thing you did, that they could not do anything to a Jew married to a German with German children.’

  ‘Your father was very brave, but I’m afraid to say very foolish, too,’ I said. ‘Tell me, was there any Jewish paraphernalia at your house?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Hannah. ‘We have a menorah that Mama inherited. We light the candles for Hanukkah, just like we sing Christmas carols and have a Christmas tree. It’s something nice to do every year and it looks very pretty with all the other decorations.’

  ‘I see …’ That complicated matters somewhat, just when everything had been looking so hopeful. But all was not lost. It all depended on the boy. ‘Tell me, young man, are you circumcised?’

  The boy shook his head, blushing to the roots of his hair.

  ‘Well then, you weren’t brought up as a Jew. And if you weren’t, nor were your sisters. I’m sure I’ll be able to resolve this unfortunate situation, but for now I must return to my work. You will stay here until I return. I’ll ask Fräulein Krankl, my assistant, to bring you something to eat and drink.’

  I drove straight back to the railway siding. Things were not going well. Because of all the rain we’d had over the previous few weeks, the wheels of the gas vans were churning up the earth and turning it into thick, impassable mud. As a result the vans couldn’t get close enough to the pit to enable the bodies to be dumped into it. There was nothing for it but to shoot the Jews instead. So the day was longer and a great deal more unpleasant than the men had anticipated, which had a very damaging effect on their morale and thus their efficiency. The Jews were treated with even more brutality than usual. I had at least saved the Langs from that, but keeping them alive might well be a great deal more difficult.

  44

  There was a cellar beneath the Lenin House that was sometimes used for storage. There wasn’t much down there at the time and it was out of the way, so that was where I installed the Langs and their baggage. Whenever anyone asked who they were or what they were doing down there I simply replied that they were Germans who appeared to have been misclassified as Jews. If anyone showed any signs of disapproval, and few dared do that to my face, I pointed out that no one in Minsk had done more than I in the service of our national mission to eliminate the scourge of world Jewry. And it was precisely because I was so determined to rid Europe of the Jews that I did not wish to see good Germans suffer the fate reserved for subhumans. Of course, I had no personal interest whatever in the scourge of world Jewry, even assuming there was such a thing. I was just doing my job. But over the months I had acquired a reputation in Minsk as a hard, unflinching perfectionist, so no one dared question my motives.

  No one, that is, apart from von Toll: ‘Are we talking man-to-man now?’ he asked, as we sat over a bottle of vodka.

  ‘Of course – we’re talking as friends.’

  ‘Then you won’t mind me saying that I think you’re crazy, bringing that blonde and her family back here. For God’s sake, man, you of all people can’t be seen screwing Jews.’

  ‘I don’t intend to.’

  Von Toll gave a laugh of mocking disbelief. ‘You don’t intend to screw a woman who looks like that? Then you won’t be shot for fucking Jews. You’ll be shot for being a pansy!’

  ‘You know I’m not a pansy. And I know she’s not a Jew. I’ve checked her bloodline and her family history and it is quite clear that she and her siblings have been wrongly classified. They are categorically not Jews.’

  Von Toll slapped me on the back. ‘Well, if you can prove that, you deserve to screw her. And she should be damn grateful, too.’

  For his part, Strauch didn’t waste any time when I informed him that there were three transportees from Vienna currently installed in the cellar. He’d heard about Hannah Lang and immediately jumped straight to the same conclusion as von Toll: ‘You know that if you fuck her it could be a court-martial offence?’

  I repeated what I’d told von Toll: ‘She’s not a Jew. She’s a Mischling of the second degree.’ But then I added something new that had occurred to me overnight: ‘The situation of the Langs is actually a very interesting one. To the Jews they are Jews, since the religion is passed on through the maternal line. To us Germans, however, they are, or rather should be, German, since we are principally interested in the father. One might describe them as racial double-agents. I can see that coming in useful.’

  ‘Oh really? And where, precisely, do you intend to use them … other than your bed?’

  ‘I don’t know. But in the meantime, I shall find something for them to do. Jew or Gentile, they should be working for their living.’

  ‘We could just kill them, you know.’

  ‘Not if they are German we can’t.’

  ‘They came here with papers that say they are Jews. You may file, for the record, your argument stating that they’ve been wrongly designated. You may do whatever you want with any of them: work them, screw them, kill them, it’s all the same to me. But they eat Jews’ rations and they keep the yellow stars on their coats.’

  ‘I don’t want them in the ghetto, though. Not yet.’

  Strauch thought for a second and said: ‘Fine. But if you file your arguments for reclassifying the Langs as German, then I’ll note my concerns in writing, too. Berlin can decide who was right, if it ever comes to that. I’m too tired to bother with it now. I’m not sleeping well at the moment. Do you find that, too – that it’s hard to sleep?’

  ‘Sometimes.’

  Strauch took off his glasses, rubbed a hand over his face and then looked at me with screwed-up eyes, trying to get me in focus. ‘I must say, Heuser, you are the last person on earth I’d have expected to do something like this,’ he said, putting the glasses back on. He blinked a couple of times and then examined me more directly. ‘You don’t normally so much as take a shit without making sure that it’ll be to your advantage. You must know what a risk you are taking with this. I have no reason to wish you ill. You’ve always been a good officer. But I won’t be here for ever. My replacement might well take a different view.’

  ‘That’s why I’m going to make sure that all the Langs’ paperwork, along with my accompanying legal arguments, are perfectly in order. I haven’t completely lost track of my senses.’

  Strauch gave me an uncharacteristic grimace that might almost have passed for a friendly smile. ‘Oh, I think you have. And it’s really quite fascinating, like watching a lion fall in love with a gazelle: one can’t help wondering when it’ll rediscover its true nature and eat.’

  It turned out that Hannah Lang could type and take dictation, so I added her to the secretarial pool at the KdS. Gottfried had been in his first year at the Medical University before being deported and Liselotte wanted to be a nurse like her late mother. Very well – there was always a need for more workers at the army hospital.

  I told all three of them to keep their eyes and ears open. I wanted to know what people were saying – our own soldiers and KdS staff, just as much as the other Jews, or the Russians. If asked, they were to tell the truth about their situation: they were in limbo, neither Jewish enough to be killed, nor German enough to be safe. I assumed that the Jews would try to exploit the Langs, just as I had done. So I warned them they should remember where their interests lay. I possessed absolute power over them: the Jews had none whatsoever. I was therefore the better friend.

  For now at least they were safe, but the whole business was proving to be a monumental distraction. And the most absurd aspect of it all was that I had not yet laid or even attempted to lay so much as a finger on Hannah Lang.

  *

  We were now well into October. Sometimes, even in Minsk, there came a beautiful day, and it was possible to imagine what life would be like if the city were not half ruined and the woods still unsullied. One particular morning the air was cold and refreshing. The sun shone down from a clear blue sky through trees already beginning to shed their red and golden leaves. I thought of Hannah Lang. Perhaps it was just the joy of a perfect day making me giddily optimistic, but it seemed to me that when I was with her I was just a little bit more like my old self again, and I wanted to show her that there still was still a decent, thoughtful man beneath my forbidding SS uniform. I knew it might take some time to win her round, but I was willing to be patient. It would also be difficult to be seen together in public, at least at first, so I might have to take her back to my private quarters. I very much hoped she would not jump to the wrong conclusion as to my intentions. I desired her, of course I did. But my feelings were far deeper and more worthy than the animal lust that Strauch and von Toll had described when they spoke of her. ‘Maybe I’m a fool,’ I said to myself, ‘but I want Hannah and I to be lovers.’