Franz bent under the worn trestle desk and blew his nose again on the scrap of newspaper he’d filched from the rubbish bin outside, though each of these trivial actions brought him close to death. For any kind of stealing, even from a rubbish bin, a man would be put straight on the list for the Chamber; the same thing applied if he showed signs of disease, even a cold—the Kommandant prided himself on the excellent health record of his model camp. But then, for any one of seventy-five infractions—carefully enumerated on the board in each barrack block—a man would find himself on the list, and Franz wasn’t overly concerned. On the other hand, you didn’t just ask for trouble, and he had no faith in this “guardian angel” of his. It could only be a coincidence that the phrase used by Corporal Trot at Buchenwald had been repeated a few weeks after Franz had arrived here at Debno. He’d been on the list for taking a pair of shoes from a corpse, but half an hour before he was due to report outside the Chamber he’d been called to the gatehouse to see Sergeant Steiger.

  “I see you’re down for light duties, Gerlach.”

  Franz waited in silence. Sergeant Steiger had made a statement, not asked a question. He spoke very softly, his thick lips moving carefully in his plump face, as if he were tasting something. You had to listen as hard as you could, and even lean toward him without letting it show, because in speaking softly his aim was to make you ask him what he’d said, and then he’d look up with his bland colorless eyes and tell you that if you didn’t care to listen to what he said, you’d better go on the list.

  You could die, at Debno, by taking a scrap of newspaper, or blowing your nose, or not understanding Sergeant Steiger.

  “Why didn’t you tell me you were on light duties, Gerlach, when you were put on the list?”

  “Because I didn’t know, Sergeant.”

  The fleshy lips made their little rings. “You didn’t know.”

  Statement. Don’t say anything.

  The initial terror that Franz had felt when he first met this NCO hadn’t diminished; it had become a means of defense. He had learned to regard Sergeant Steiger as a venomous snake that would strike at the slightest movement. Provoking Sergeant Steiger was not one of the seventy-five infractions on the board, but it was just as fatal.

  “Since you are officially on light duties, Gerlach, I shall remove you from the list for the Chamber.”

  Don’t say anything.

  From outside in the main compound they both heard a man scream, and Franz watched the Sergeant’s round pink face take on a hint of a smile. Then there was the sharp crack of a gun and the screaming stopped, and in a moment Sergeant Steiger looked back at his papers.

  “You must have a guardian angel, Gerlach, to have been put on permanent light duties.”

  Statement. Don’t speak.

  “Have you a guardian angel, Gerlach?” So softly that an SS clerk typing at the far en
  “I don’t think so, Sergeant.” He spoke without thinking.

  Mistake. A dangerous mistake.

  The small colorless eyes came to rest on him, taking on a glitter. “Just a moment ago, Gerlach, I told you that you must have a guardian angel. You now say that you don’t think so. Am I, therefore, wrong?”

  “No, Sergeant.”

  “Then,” silkily, “you do indeed have a guardian angel?”

  “Yes, Sergeant.”

  “Who is it?”

  “I don’t know, Sergeant.”

  As the clerk at the far end of the room stopped typing there was a moment’s silence, and in that silence there came another scream from outside. Sergeant Steiger turned his head again to listen, and Franz later realized the dying man had probably saved him, by distracting the Sergeant’s attention. In a few seconds there was another shot, and the screaming stopped. Sergeant Steiger looked down, and made a mark with his pencil.

  “I’m glad, Gerlach, that you don’t consider I was wrong, after all. I might have put you on fatigues, to correct your thinking. You wouldn’t like that, would you?”

  “No, Sergeant.”

  Normal fatigues meant hard physical work, helping to extend the buildings in the camp, or break stones for the road to the railhead. Sergeant Steiger’s fatigues were more refined: as his personal concession to Kommandant Axen’s pride in a healthy camp, he picked three men each day and had them perform exercises for the improvement of fitness—press-ups, running on the spot and so on. They knew that once they stopped they’d be shot for disobeying orders, so most of them tried to survive, and finally fell exhausted with their lungs gasping and sweat running on them, and were shot for being unfit, and therefore diseased. “Sergeant Steiger’s fatigues” had gone into the camp language, and it meant the same as “going on the list.”

  “You will know in future, then, Gerlach, that until otherwise ordered, you are on light duties.” He folded his plump hands and gazed up at Franz with a glitter coming again to his eyes. “And by whose bounteous providence, would you imagine, is this privilege granted?”

  Listen carefully. Think.

  “My guardian angel’s, Sergeant.”

  “Very good, Gerlach. I’m glad you agree. You are now dismissed.”

  Heels smartly together, the right arm shooting up. “Dismissed, Sergeant! Heil Hitler!" And about turn, with his heart still pounding, as if reminding him that thanks to a miracle he was still in the land of the living.

  “One day,” Kurt Wolff had told him, “I’ll go on the list, like we all shall, and just before I report outside the Chamber I’ll go along to the gatehouse and spit in the face of Sergeant Steiger, right here, see, right here between his fucking eyes.”

  They all said they’d do something like that, when their name went on to the list. But they didn’t mean it. In the Chamber you’d die in a matter of ten minutes or so, quietly saying your prayers to the throbbing of the big engine that was feeding you the gas; but if you touched an SS man they’d make sure you took days over it, fingernail after fingernail, until the madness killed you. And they took great care that you knew what would happen; otherwise there was always the danger that a man with nothing to lose would take someone with him. It was all part of the functional efficiency of a model camp.

  “You sound,” Kurt Wolff told Franz as they worked at the letters of condolence, “as if you’ve got a cold.” He turned his intense olive-brown eyes on his friend.

  “Thanks,” said Franz. It was a strange answer but Kurt understood that here at Debno it meant: Thanks for reminding me. I don't want to die.

  Later, when they’d eaten their supper at the crowded canteen table, they sat on their bunks in B Block, as the sweet strains of the violin floated across the compound. They had eaten well, each of them taking a whole slice of stale bread and a small bowl of cooked beans,, with scraps of meat in them; not many could eat like that, but Kurt was not only the block senior— he also enjoyed respect as a veteran, with a low Buchenwald number tattooed on his wrist. He’d already survived over two years’ detention, and was experienced; within a month of his arrival at Debno he had taken over control of the crude but effective intelligence network that was a feature in every camp.

  He had sought out Franz and Willi for his lieutenants after watching them for a time and finding out from the Orderly Room what it was that had brought them to Debno. Franz, despite his youth, had shown not only an iron sense of justice in what he’d done, but a lot of guts. Willi, the quiet ex-tennis champion, had been in love with a Jewess, and had killed the Gestapo man who’d found them together one night in Dresden, where her father had owned a small porcelain factory. He needed men like these.

  “We might begin,” he told them quietly, “by starting three fires, one here in our own block, one in the Orderly Room, and one in the Kommandant’s quarters.”

  They listened intently, watching the shadows for movement; the SS guards were always on the prowl. At first they’d had no real faith in Kurt Wolff’s plans, simply because they seemed impossible; but Kurt was a forty-year-old Rhinelander, a farmer, short, strong, built like a bull, with a brand of countryman’s wisdom they responded to, in this place where insanity was the norm.

  “Once the fire’s going,” his low voice came again, “we take advantage of the confusion and jump the guards, taking their guns. Each of us, you understand, going for one guard, and one gun.”

  They listened to every word, committing it to memory, as he’d told them they must. As he talked on in the shadowed hut, the notes of the violin outside died away, and the heavy metal door of the Chamber slammed shut. Then there came the strange sound, itself not unlike music, that they’d never got used to. It was a chorus, faint and discordant, like a huge kettle singing. After ten or fifteen minutes it faded away, and there was only the throbbing of the big engine, while here in the long open-ended building three or four Jews began chanting the Viddui.

  Kurt stopped talking for a moment, sitting on the edge of the bunk with his blunt head lowered as he fretted with the calluses on his thick square hands. Willi, a lithe and quietly moving Berliner not much older than Franz, went to the doorway, not making a sound. He stood with his shaven head lifted, but his friends couldn’t tell whether he was praying or just looking up at the stars; his head was outlined faintly in reddish gold as the fine hairs on his scalp caught the light from the distant arc lamps outside: he’d arrived here sporting a thick ginger mop, before the camp barbers got at him. (Kommandant Axen had stopped for a moment on his rounds of inspection to tell Willi that he’d watched him winning on the courts in the national amateur championships, and to congratulate him.) Willi differed from Kurt and Franz in that he now wore the green triangle of the Befristete Vorbeugungshäftlinge, as a prisoner in limited-term protective custody.

  Franz sat listening with his friends to the familiar sounds of the night, waiting, as they were, for the business to be finished. After a while they heard the big iron door of the Chamber swinging open and slamming back against the wall with the clang of a gigantic bell; then immediately there came the tramping of feet as the nine dental surgeons left the building next door at a run, heading for the scene of their work.

  Willi moved back from the doorway and crouched on the concrete floor, his body bouncing lightly to keep his thigh muscles exercised, a habit of his. As Kurt began talking again, adding to his plan the changes that had occurred to him during the day, the faint smell of exhaust gas came drifting across from the Chamber.

  “The timing is very important, you understand. At three in the morning there would only be twelve guards at the night stations and two on patrol. We would wait for them to come around first, and then go for the others. We would take their uniforms and put them on, and slide their bodies under the latrine hut.”

  It was impossible for Franz not to feel excitement, even though he didn’t expect to leave this place alive. But in listening to the confident tones of the farmer he also felt strengthened, remembering that in the history of the world nothing had proved stronger than men’s dreams. At Buchenwald Franz had lost touch with reality for a time, drowning in the black despair of knowing what he had done to his family. They were never out of his thoughts. Through the days and the nights, while the guards shouted and the clubs lifted and fell, he had loved his family, longing for a letter from them, just one, in the hope that they might have by now forgiven him; and then, as the whips cracked and the train rumbled beneath his frozen limbs and the gates of Debno swung open for him, he had hated them, his family, for not writing to him, not even one letter, and for not forgiving him; then he’d realized how wrong that was, and that he could go on loving them, even if they’d stopped loving him. Here at Debno, where death was so close that every day he saw it come to the people around him, he’d finally arrived at a true perspective, in the way that people, dying, could accept truths they’d always been afraid to live with, because there was a future to get through. That made it easier for him, and he realized that in the hardest of schools he’d now reached maturity before his time, as if in compensation for the fact that whatever manhood he might have had was already on the block.

  Yet, listening to the deep voice of his friend Kurt Wolff, it was impossible for him not to feel the excitement flickering through his body, because his body was * still young in spite of his solemn philosophizing; and his spirit, still not bludgeoned to the point of apathy, was also listening.

  “Wearing SS uniform,” Kurt told them, his voice so low that it was no more than a resonance, “we would approach the watchtower on the left of the gate, and say we had a written message from Sergeant Steiger that must be read at once. If the guard decided not to break the rules and come down, that would be all right. One of us would go up to him, taking the message.” He paused, and when he spoke again they both heard the rising energy in his voice, the force that was driving his thoughts day and night to the moment when his dream would break its chains and become a storm, a hurricane. “I would be the one,” he said, “to go up to the tower. A minute later, we would have a machine gun in our possession. This, you understand, would be the end of the first phase of the action. And remember, we are not alone. In A Block, and C Block, the others will be working with us, just as I’ve instructed them.”

  As Franz and Willi listened to him they became aware of a faraway sound, among the hills beyond the camp, the heavy rolling of metal in the night. For a few minutes Kurt went on talking, then stopped to listen with them.

  “They didn’t tell us,” Franz said.

  The rumbling grew louder, slowing at last toward the railhead. There came the hissing of steam, then the piercing sound of-'brakes.

  “It must be from Kozuchow,” said Willi, his head turned to the doorway. “They’re full up again, at Kozuchow.”

  They listened to the distant sounds, the banging of the cattle ramps as they were swung down from the trucks, and the barking of the guard dogs.

  “We’ll get no sleep,” Kurt said, “tonight.”

  They went outside to look at the train, a distant frieze of light and dark along the skyline with the lamps of the SS guards swinging their beams across the crowded trucks. The voices of children could be heard, calling out in their bewilderment, and once again the Rhineland farmer had to force his strong body to stillness and silence, holding back the terrible urge to rush the watch-tower there and then, and pump death out of that machine gun wherever he saw an SS uniform. But that would do no good: it would be an act of self-indulgence. The most difficult part of his master plan was not in the recruiting of fearless and resolute men, nor in designing its complex strategies, but in having to wait, while night after night the cries of the children kept him from sleep.

  Franz took another card from the box.

  “Name?”

  “Jungerman.”

  “I want your full name.”

  “Hans Jungerman.”

  “Age?”

  “Fifty-two.”

  Franz went on with his questions, his head hot and dizzy with the temperature he was running. The new

  arrivals had already been through the Gestapo office, but these details were for the Orderly Room files of the SS.

  “Stand over there, please.”

  None of these people showed any bruises. Things were different here from the way most of the camps were run. We have a job to do, Kommandant Axen had told them, and it must be carried out smoothly, quietly and efficiently. The new arrivals will proceed more willingly to the Chamber if they are not alarmed. You must use your intelligence. We have a heavy quota to deal with: seven hundred and fifty people must receive treatment every day, even more on the occasions when Kozuchow reaches temporary saturation point. I expect you, the members of the prisoner staff, to work with efficiency, cheerfulness and a good heart, and show the Reichsführer that in Debno Camp we have created a model of its kind.

  Franz took another card.

  “Name?”

  “Rosen.”

  “Other name?”

  “Rita.”

  Franz felt the mucus blocking his nose again, and tilted back his head, closing his bloodshot eyes against the glare of the light bulb, snuffling hard.

  “Have you a cold?” the woman asked him.

  “No. Age?”

  “Thirty-two.”

  A small boy was beside her, his hands on the edge of the desk, his large eyes watching Franz.

  “Is this your son, Frau Rosen?”

  “Yes.”

  Franz took another card.

  It was four in the morning.

  Just before half past five the last of them were coming through, among them a tall, graying man who field himself well considering he had spent six hours in a jammed cattle truck.

  “Name?”

  “Professor Ernst Kramer.”

  Franz wrote it down. The yellow card kept blurring as his eyes watered from fatigue and the throbbing of his sinuses.

  “Age?”

  “Forty-six.”

  “Occupation?”

  “I am a physicist.”

  20

  BERLIN, 12 MARCH 1940

  While Professor Ernst Kramer was walking through the gates of Debno death camp, on the other side of the Polish border, a man rocked and moaned in a chair in a basement room of Gestapo Headquarters in Berlin. This was the second upright wooden chair they had given him, lashing him to it with one-inch straps; the first had broken, half an hour ago, the back legs buckling under the man’s weight as the blow from the truncheon had sent him against the wall.

  Soon after eleven o’clock, Superintendent Vogel came down to inquire as to progress. Stepping across the shining pool of blood on the floor, he stood in front of the prisoner and thumbed open his eyelids.

  “Don’t go too far,” he ordered the two men. They had taken off their tunics, and their singlets were soaked with sweat. The man in charge, of the detail was Sergeant Grossfeldt, a heavyweight boxer who had brought honors to his unit in the last three intercity tournaments.