The Road Between Us (39 page)

His chest still heaving, Edward takes a break to pull a splinter from his palm. He takes in the pile of logs and feels a deep and unfamiliar sense of communion with nature, as if an entangled part of him is coming loose. More than that he feels masculated again, no longer the impotent captive. His brow feels gritty with dried sweat and dust, and his hands are tingling from the vibration, and this makes
him feel not tired but exalted. Oddly transcendent, too, as if the monkey chatter in his head has been stilled and he is being led to his own calm centre.

‘Feeling better now?’

He turns. Hannah is watching him from the corner of the barn, a lit cigarette between her lips. As he studies her he feels a tenderness in his fingertips, like an erogenous ache. ‘Yes, surprisingly so,’ he says.

She takes a drag and eyes him as she gives a long out-breath. ‘Let’s see those muscles, then.’

Edward flexes a bicep and grins.

As she walks towards him she flips the porcelain cap on the bottle of beer and holds it out by the neck. ‘Brought you this.’

‘Thanks.’

After handing it over she drops to her knees slowly and, as if preparing for execution, lowers herself until the side of her head is flat against the chopping block. ‘Look at these rings,’ she says, running her finger over the clammy surface of the log as she tries to count them. ‘Each one a year. This tree must have been here for a century.’ Her voice seems distant, as if she is talking in her sleep.

That night, when her father has gone to bed, Hannah looks under the magazine again for his notebook. It has gone. She rests her hands on the chimneypiece. The key she had found the night before catches her eye. She passes it from one hand to the other, back and forth several times as she thinks, then she heads downstairs and tries it in the locked door she had found on her first morning here. It turns easily.

She feels for a light switch but when she finds one and flicks it no bulb comes on. Recalling the torch on top of the fridge she collects it and, casting its beam around the room, sees it is a gallery of some kind: half a dozen framed charcoal drawings of scenes from what looks like a concentration camp. There are identical skeletal prisoners in striped uniforms. A gallows. Some sort of a roll call. One shows a prisoner being crucified upside down. Her hand rises
to her mouth as she takes in another sketch, this one depicting a naked man being hanged. Another two prisoners are apparently copulating on a gallows while a soldier points a rifle at them.

Her grip loosened by shock, she drops the torch and backs out of the room.

After breathing deeply for a few seconds she nods to herself in determination and walks back in. She now notices the dustsheet over a cabinet at the end of the room. Removing it, she sees a glass-topped display case similar to the ones containing butterflies upstairs in the entrance hall. Inside it is an SS ceremonial sword with two gold tassels on its handle, a silver cigar holder with the SS initials engraved on it, some white fencing gloves embroidered with the letters SS in gold thread and three bowls with gold-plated rims and small swastikas in the centre.

This time she runs out and slams the door behind her.

Back in the kitchen she puts the torch back on top of the fridge with trembling fingers before moving to the sink and splashing cold water on her face.

III

THE NEXT MORNING, HANNAH EATS HER BREAKFAST IN A
thought-filled silence. She has not slept well, feeling unsettled by her discovery that their host appears to be a neo-Nazi. As she lay awake she weighed up whether she should tell her father what she had found, before insisting that they both pack their bags and leave. But she has decided it would be best not to. Not yet. He seems happy here, happier than she has seen him since his release, and she doesn’t want to introduce anything that will change his mood. Besides, he has finally started coming to terms with his years of captivity, enough to write about what happened. She is sure he must be finding that process therapeutic, so much so that he might soon be able to talk about it too, if not to her or Uncle Niall then to a professional.

She must look distracted because when her father comes down to breakfast he asks: ‘Everything all right?’

‘I was thinking I would quite like to get out of the house for a while,’ she answers too airily. ‘I found those bikes that Mike mentioned. They were in the stable propped up against a wooden horse. Do you fancy exploring?’

‘You go. I think I might stay here and do some more writing.’

‘Writing?’

‘Oh, it’s nothing. Some ideas I wanted to get down on paper.’

‘Your memoir?’

He falters. ‘Yeah. A draft of sorts.’

‘Can I read it?’

‘Not yet.’

‘Why not?’

‘It’s incomplete. There’s something missing, but I haven’t worked out what yet.’

‘A resolution?’

‘Yes, maybe.’

Having arrived at the house from the right, Hannah decides to turn left at the main entrance gate. Seeing the tennis ball she had hit over the wall, she stops to pick it up, dropping it into the bike’s basket. Five hundred yards further on she comes to a sign which points to ‘
Camp du Struthof
’ in one direction and ‘
La chambre à gaz
’ in the other. Puzzled, she continues cycling and comes to a structure made from wooden scaffolding, a gateway. It is partly concealed behind a line of trees and hanging from its central beam is a wooden sign reading: ‘
Konzentrationslager Natzweiler-Struthof
’. There is a middle-aged woman in a baseball cap posing for a photograph beneath it. Grey tendrils of hair are spiralling out from under the cap, as if trying to escape.

Behind her Hannah now sees three parked coaches in a semicircular area with a public lavatory and a hot-dog stand. Two boys are playing with a football there, bouncing it against a wall. She parks her bike and walks to the entrance gate. Here she finds herself looking down on a perimeter of concrete fence posts covering an area about three-quarters of a mile square. Wire is suspended between them, some barbed, some, judging by the plastic insulators, electric. The camp is constructed as an amphitheatre with a series of terraced platforms linked by steps. The wooden barracks are painted blue-grey and are separated by grassy slopes.

At the highest point of the valley there is a white stone monument the size of a three-storey house. It coils around itself in the shape of a spinnaker. Carved into its side is the outline of a man.

There are perhaps fifty tourists wandering around inside the perimeter and coming from one of the buildings is the sound of a
young child having a tantrum. The other visitors are silent. Hannah steps forward so that she can read a small sign. ‘This camp where so many martyrs died for their homeland is more than a cemetery. A most absolute dignity is requested. Decent clothing and behaviour are required. Smoking and pets are not allowed.’

‘Hello, Hannah.’

She turns to see the diminutive, stooping figure of François emerging from what looks like a ticket office. He is walking with the aid of a crooked stick that seems to have been chosen to mirror his posture, two twisted roots rising from the earth.

‘Oh, hello,’ Hannah says, trying to hide the confusion in her voice. ‘I was exploring. We didn’t even know this place was here.’

‘I wondered when you would find it,’ François says. ‘I helped liberate it during the war. Now I help out as a guide.’

‘Was this a concentration camp? Here, in France?’

‘It was, yes. One of the smallest. It was a work camp. What they called an
Arbeitserziehungslager
, a labour-education camp. But many thousands of people died here from starvation and exhaustion.’

‘Did you say you helped liberate it?’

‘I was a major in the Free French Army, in charge of coordinating the Resistance from London. There were some Jews and gypsies in this camp – the
Untermenschen
as they called them, the subhuman races – but most of the inmates were political prisoners. Frenchmen. Resistance. Communists. Homosexuals. Come, let me show you around.’

They follow a tarmac path curving down the slope and come to a square where the dust is red. ‘This was where they had the roll call,’ the old man continues. ‘They had to assemble here at five o’clock every morning, then again at noon and in the evening.’

Hannah, thinking back to what she has seen in the hidden room, points at a raised platform. ‘What’s that?’

‘The gallows. The original rope is in the museum. Whenever there was an escape attempt the prisoners would be forced to watch the executions.’

He raises his stick and prods with it in the direction of a building
made of brick. ‘And that is where the kapos slept, the prisoners who saved their own skins by working as guards. The inmates hated them. They were sadists. Some of them were worse than the SS. Let me show you something.’ He comes to three rows of sturdy red-brick barracks. ‘This is the thing about which I am most proud. The Museum to the Resistance. I helped set it up.’

Inside they watch grainy black and white footage of the liberation of the camp by American soldiers, as well as images of prisoners marching to a quarry. A framed photograph shows de Gaulle inaugurating the camp as a French national monument in 1968. Alongside this are other black and white photographs of executions and beatings.

‘Their efficient prison system required that log books be kept,’ François says, tapping a thick ledger with his walking stick. ‘In here are listed the prisoners’ names, nationalities, political status, date of entry, and also dates of death and cause of death.’

Once outside again, François says:‘See this building here? Come. This was the medical pathology room.’ He leads the way, making a sharp tapping sound on the stone with the stick. ‘In here SS doctors performed experiments on live patients. The homosexuals usually. The Nazis would try to “cure” them. Sometimes the patients would be given the opportunity to undergo “renunciation tests”. If they succeeded in being aroused by the prostitutes provided for them, they passed.’

‘François, I have to ask you something,’ Hannah says, raising her sunglasses up on to her forehead. ‘I probably shouldn’t have, but I went into the locked room at the house last night.’

‘Ah yes,’ the old man says. ‘The house was where the camp commandant lived, you see. It was his official residence. Those sketches were found behind a false wall, along with the sword.’ François studies her with rheumy eyes. ‘You are wondering about your host, I think.’ He looks around. ‘Yes, Herr Walser is German, but he is a good German. I know this in my bones. Besides, he was born after the war. And he has been most generous. The Nazis abandoned this camp more or less intact but there has been a lot of
pressure to develop the site over the years. The locals don’t like it because a lot of collaborators were held here after the war and they don’t want to be reminded of the fact. And in the 1970s Nazi sympathizers burned down some of the buildings. Herr Walser paid for its restoration. In fact it would not have been preserved at all were it not for him. He does not tell people, but much of the funding for this camp comes from him. I think it is his way of atoning for the crimes of his people.’

François shakes his head as he points to a tray laden with syringes, scalpels and clamps. In the middle of the room is a porcelain dissection table with grooves for draining blood. ‘In their efficient way, the Nazis built the crematoria next door. Follow me.’

Hannah follows a few paces behind as the old man leads her into a building with a smokestack made of brick rising above it. Inside is a room with peeling walls and three ovens with their heavy steel doors open. There is an arrangement of long pokers hung on the wall next to these, and flowers and candles spitting hot wax placed inside them on the sliding trays. ‘This was where they burned the bodies.’

Hannah covers her mouth.

‘I said earlier that this was not officially an extermination camp but there was a small gas chamber …’ François points out of the window to a white building with a ventilation chimney in the middle of its roof, ‘in that old farmhouse over there. After the war they found eighty-six skulls preserved in alcohol at the University of Strasbourg’s Institute of Anatomy. They were Jews who had been gassed here so that their skulls could be sent for analysis. It was said that that inn over there continued to serve guests as they watched the naked Jews being led into the gas chamber across the street.’

‘What monsters,’ Hannah says in a small voice.

‘Have you heard of Adolf Eichmann?’

‘We did him in GCSE history.’

‘Well, that incident came up at Eichmann’s trial in 1962. He had arranged the transport of the skulls, you see. The artist who did those sketches you found also did a sketch of the Jews being led to
the gas chamber, and that was used as evidence in the trial. And the prosecutors were able to produce a document written by the project contractors which made specific mention of a gas chamber at Natzweiler-Struthof. That was unusual because the Nazis were careful about destroying such things and when they did put anything down on paper they normally used coded terminology.’

Hannah sniffs. ‘Thank you for showing me all this, François.’

‘I am going to have my ashes scattered here,’ he says with a cheerful, stained-tooth grin.

Hannah rubs the back of her neck. ‘So this camp was discovered at the end of the war?’

‘No, the Americans officially liberated it in November 1944, but it was empty by then. The inmates had been evacuated to Dachau in September. One of the so-called death marches. All the Americans found were a few corpses in the infirmary. They had been left to die in their beds when the rest of the camp was evacuated.’

‘Didn’t you say the French liberated the camp?’

‘It’s complicated. Your grandfather never mentioned it?’

Hannah starts. She studies the old man’s face. ‘My grandfather? How do you know about my grandfather?’

‘We were comrades in arms.’ The old man turns and leads the way back to the entrance gate.

Hannah remains standing where she is for a moment, then she jogs to catch up with the old man. ‘What’s going on? How do you know about us? How do you know about my grandfather?’