Therefore Choose (16 page)

“I never thought I'd see anything like this,” said Harold.

“Perhaps it's what we've been fighting against,” said George.

Medieval painters of scenes of Hell would not have been able to imagine this. It was as if someone had said, “What do you think it is to be human? I'll show you.” Movement was reduced to sticks and skin, vigour to a jumble of contorted limbs, value to something thrown away as rubbish.

“Utter degradation,” said Harold. “I suppose I should have known, but I didn't know. War is bad enough, but I didn't know how inhuman people could be.”

In a civilized country, thought George. If it can happen here, it can happen anywhere. He looked at Harold, who seemed to be thinking the same thing.

“This is what human beings are capable of,” said Harold. “You don't need airplanes and tanks: just a lorry load of wooden stakes and a few rolls of barbed wire. Three weeks of pain without water and food, your body gradually consumes your muscles, you get to this.”

George and Harold moved to one side to avoid the bulldozer as it backed up, and noticed four young women, perhaps sisters, in a line not far away, looking at the piles of bodies. The young women were thin and haggard, with cropped hair. The tallest of them raised her eyes to look across the pile at George and Harold, who both looked downwards in shame.

“Sheer hopelessness,” said Harold. “Think of decent young girls, like those four: no sanitation, no privacy, no modesty. What do they feel? They'll probably survive now, but they know this was intended for them. Perhaps their parents are in that pile. An indelible mark on the mind and spirit. What will their lives be from now on?”

George and Harold's visit to the camp took place on the third day after the British took it over. Already, people said, things were much better. Water had been brought in, enough even for people to start washing themselves. There were two meals a day, and although many were too far gone, medical help was being given.

On April 19, though neither George nor Harold saw it, the following appeared in
The Times
:

THE CAPTIVES OF BELSEN

INTERNMENT CAMP HORRORS

BRITISH OFFICER'S STATEMENT

British Second Army H.Q., April 18

General Dempsey's senior medical officer, a brigadier, said here today that the Belsen concentration camp, near Bremen, with its thousands of typhus, typhoid, and tuberculosis cases, was “the most horrible, frightful place” he had ever seen. He stayed in this camp for 48 hours, and today gave an account of what he had seen.

He said there was a pile between 60 to 80 yards long, 30 yards wide, and four feet high, of the unclothed bodies of women, all within sight of several hundred children. Gutters were filled with rotting dead, and men had come to the gutters to die, using the kerbstones as backrests.

Three weeks later, the war was over. George's unit was ordered to Bremen, where the bulk of the 52nd Lowland Division ended their campaign. There George saw the devastation of aerial bombardment. Later he found out that Bremen had received 170 bombing raids, starting in 1940 and with the last of them the day before British troops entered the city.

“They were bomb happy,” a major in the Cameronians told George. “After our Lancasters paid a few visits, and after we mopped up the remaining resistance on the ground, people went wild.”

“Here more than elsewhere?”

“Looting, running off with whatever they could find, getting hold of alcohol somehow, fighting among themselves. Demoralized people from internment camps found their way into town, looking for something to eat.”

“Perhaps that's always what happens.”

“Worse than that. For a few days this was the most debauched place on the face of God's Earth.”

George didn't reply.

“You must have seen it yourself, overrunning a village. When the guns and men in uniform come, they see it's the end. They come to terms with it. They give up. But here all sanctions broke down.”

He paused, apparently thinking of what to say.

“These were the people who voted for Hitler,” the major said. “They wanted it. They simply couldn't accept the idea of their own defeat, the consequences of their own political stupidity.”

Among the prisoners was a man who reminded George of Werner. George took him aside. He was a captain in the Waffen-SS. He had a university degree and he had been a teacher in a secondary school in Hamburg. He seemed not so much broken as stunned.

“You speak good German,” he said to George.

“Will you go back to teaching?”

“Who knows what will happen? All I know is that I prefer to be captured by the British than the Russians.”

“When did you first think that you would lose?”

“We did not think we would lose.”

“After Stalingrad, and after the Americans joined the war, how could you look at the map and think you could win?”

“We were soldierly. Every time we engaged you Tommies or the Yanks, we won. We were strong. And we had secret weapons.”

“Now it's over.”

George looked him in the eye, to see the human being there. Nothing. Did he imagine it? Was the human in this being already snuffed out?

“Prisoner of war for how long?” the SS captain said.

“The British and Americans see Hitler as a criminal.”

“We were fighting for our lives.”

George walked around Bremen. Parts of the walls of the Gothic Rathaus were still standing, but most of the city was rubble. British troops had started to clear some streets, but other streets were pile after pile of bricks and masonry. In some places fragments of substantial buildings stood like blind men staring with empty eye sockets. The RAF's method of using incendiaries and high explosives to start firestorms brought utter destruction, street after street after street. If cotton mills and steam engines were the emblems of the machine age of peace, this was the emblem of the machine age of war. Unsupported walls leaned precariously, as if about to fall. On the edge of a devastated area where, just beyond, there was a region that seemed mostly intact, one side of a house was completely missing, as if it had been cut in two. But two storeys up there was a piece of floor still suspended between two half-walls, on which still perched a double bed. The very image of the absurd, Anna would have said. Who had slept there? A Gestapo man and his wife? Perhaps Social Democrats who were appalled by everything that had happened. Perhaps a Jewish couple who had managed to conceal their identity. Bombing always kills civilians.

George had a sudden memory of the stones of the buildings along Trinity Street, the exquisite King's College Chapel, King's Parade, Free School Lane, along his route to lectures when he was an undergraduate. The stones had seemed timeless. How little one understands.

In a billet on the edge of the city, when George lay in bed that night — it was very good to lie in a bed — images of Bremen's ruin alternated with images of the barbed wire and corpses of Belsen.

George had imagined
that when a war was over, everyone went home. But that's not how it is. After the destruction, a functioning society must be re-established. Some of this falls to the military, including officers such as George, who speak the language of the defeated nation. Officials who had been working under the Nazis were reinstalled and put to work under the Allies.

It was during this period that George started to experience intense images of Anna. The images were not so much visual as conceptual. He imagined her as a German citizen brought before a tribunal and asked to give an account of herself. He would stand up to give testimony.

“She's a good person,” George would say. “She wanted to make a better world. She was caught up in events, but she's an exceptionally kind and thoughtful person. She is devoted to literature. She wants humanity to understand itself more deeply.”

Then, strangely, there was a literary court of love. George had a small volume of Shakespeare's sonnets that he had kept in his shirt pocket from the time he crossed the Channel to join the fighting. He would read it, and memorize poems one at a time, as if their intense longing for love and connectedness would magically keep at bay the inhumanity of what he was doing. The image that formed in the literary court of love was shaped around Sonnet 55, in which Shakespeare thinks about how his verse that praises the young man he loves would outlast everything destructive.

When wasteful war shall statues overturn,
And broils root out the works of masonry

The poem in which these lines occurred would not be destroyed. It was not material. It could enter the minds of many. It was not merely a written-down memory of the young man for whom it was written, it moved one so that the young man's lovableness could continue in the poetry and create a resonance. A piece of the very substance of loving could come into being in the mind of the reader. Shakespeare referred to his poem as “this.” So the young man would

… live in this, and dwell in lovers' eyes.

George could never write poetry, but he thought he might be able to write a novel or a story in which his depiction of love would be recognizable, perhaps even contribute to love. It would be about Anna. He would aim to turn his love for her into something that might last longer than the things he had seen destroyed.

Most strange of all was that, although George had decided vehemently that he would not be religious, he would find himself pleading for Anna at a Final Judgment. “I do not know what she may have done, or what she may have left undone,” he would hear himself saying. “I know I loved her. As human beings, we cannot achieve very much. What we do is tainted with selfishness, with conflict. But if a human being has loved or been loved, even imperfectly, that person cannot be condemned.”

Sometimes in these scenes Werner would appear, at the back of the court, and look on. George knew he had to plead for him, because he had loved him too. But he could not sustain this part of the fantasy. Werner would become muddled with the SS captain in Bremen. George thought, too, about the major in the Cameronians, who saw a society gone mad and people unable to accept how stupid they had been to put their faith in a criminal.

Why, thought George, did we not see it at the time? Why did we not see that sacking people from their jobs because they were Jewish was already a step in a war against members of society: a war against a self-created enemy, an enemy within. Why did we not see that a war against Jews was already a war? A war that would spread. A war that did spread.

Werner had put his faith in Hitler: he thought Hitler was a good person. George remembered him saying that — exactly that — after the Riefenstahl film. Werner joined the army, so that must have meant he thought Hitler would lead Germany to greatness. Did he persuade Anna of it too?

Or, he thought, is bitterness getting the better of me again? Was Werner terribly wounded when Anna and I got together? Maybe Anna was someone he'd longed for. And if he fought for his country, what then? Isn't that what we're all doing?

Perhaps what the German forces had done to the Allies, and we did to them, thought George, needed a different kind of idea, not so much a judgment as a … as a what? To the Cameronian major, it seemed straightforward. People voted for Hitler. He came to power as they wanted. Then they voted for him again, and there he was, installed permanently, as they wanted. The Leader. They were stupid, and these were the consequences. What the major didn't say was that we must choose to act without ever knowing enough.

George was pursued by these thoughts. When, after his return to London, he thought back to that period, he knew he had been unstable. His thoughts were strange. The imaginary scenes of tribunals and judgments were bizarre. His ideas about Werner, and what he could have been thinking when he joined the Wehrmacht, and had persuaded Anna, seemed almost as bad. In truth, of course, he knew almost nothing about what they would have thought, nothing whatever about what their lives had been during the war. Were they even still alive?

In Bremen, an idea occurred to George, of holding Anna in his heart as a beacon. It was a compelling idea. Once established, it stayed with him. Did this idea occur to assuage his loneliness or to assuage his guilt? Did it function to deny that he had made a mistake in choosing to abandon her, so that she had to face, alone, the fate of a society that was already launched determinedly towards the horrors it accomplished?

Why the thoughts of pleading for Anna in strange tribunals? Why the idea of Anna as a beacon? It was that Anna and he had joined. He was the one who had parted them. With so much destruction, everything else had fallen away. The knowledge that he'd been at one with Anna, even for so short a time, was the only thing of which he now felt certain.