Therefore Choose (29 page)

George sat on the stairs. Why had he left her on her own? Why had he not thought? “A kind of ending.” That was what she had written. If he'd not come to find her, perhaps she would still be alive.

He did not know how long he sat there. He went again to find the concierge, with difficulty persuaded her to come up with him to Anna's room and open it. She was not there, of course. No, the concierge did not know where she had gone. No, she had not seen her this morning. George looked around her room, a bed, a desk, a chair. It was a temporary place.

Suddenly, he could not bear to be in this building. He ran downstairs and out onto the pavement. A street. Buildings. Sporadic traffic.

Where would she have gone? Somewhere she wouldn't be found. Did she take pills and hide under sacks in some cellar full of shattered floorboards? Did she climb to a high place in a bombed-out building and cast herself down to somewhere that will not be reached until the rubble is cleared months from now?

Suddenly George knew where Anna had gone. To the Wannsee, where the three of them had been, where her relative had gone all those years ago. Unlike him, she went alone. With her she would have taken a rucksack that she would have filled with stones. She would have waded into the water, or perhaps taken out a rowing boat.

George closed his eyes and saw her slip over the side of the boat, her shoulders with the rucksack on them submerge, her fingers uncurl as her hands let go of the side of the boat, which then floated freely, its oars spread sideways. He heard a lorry rumble past. He had an image of ghostly boy soldiers looking backwards from their lorry, still hovering here, remnants of the huge armies after their era has passed.

George realized he'd been standing still, in this street, in this foreign city. He started walking.

She would have posted a letter to Werner, thought George, to inform him, to try to make peace with him, to leave him her few remaining possessions. She would have been careful to take no identification with her.

If her body is found, in a week or a month, it will be one of the anonymous bodies in the towns and countryside of Europe, in the expanses of Russia, in the islands and peninsulas of the Far East. A casualty of war.

I am very grateful to Patricia Baranek, Maja Djikic, Cynthia Good, Anne Michaels, Grant Oatley, Hannah Oatley, and Berl Schiff for reading a draft of this novel and offering their kind support and insightful suggestions. I am also very grateful to my agent, Margaret Hart, and to the people at Goose Lane Editions — Susanne Alexander, Akoulina Connell, Julie Scriver, and Susan Baker — who have been unfailingly helpful. I am especially grateful to the editor whom Goose Lane appointed to work with me, John Sweet, to the copy editor, Heather Sangster, and the proofreader, Erin Knight. They entered into the spirit of the book and made detailed suggestions that have resulted in many improvements. I am more grateful than I can say to Jennifer Jenkins — my principal editor as well as my spouse — for her several readings of several drafts and her many and varied kindnesses, suggestions, and understandings.

My main source for conditions in Germany before the war has been Richard Evans (2005)
The Third Reich in Power, 1933-1939
. New York: Penguin. For conditions in Germany during and after the war, including people's attitudes to the war, I have used W.G. Sebald (2003)
On the Natural History of Destruction
. Toronto: Knopf Canada; Osmar White (1996)
Conqueror's Road: An Eyewitness Report of Germany 1945
. New York: HarperCollins; Max Hastings (2004)
Armageddon: The Battle for Germany 1944-1945
. New York: Knopf; Martin Gilbert (1995)
The Day the War Ended: May 8, 1945 — Victory in Europe
. New York: Henry Holt; Antony Beevor (2002)
The
Fall of Berlin, 1945
. New York: Viking Penguin; Giles Macdonoch (2007)
After the Reich: The Brutal History of the Allied Occupation
. New York: Basic Books; and Mark Mazower (2008)
Hitler's Empire: Nazi Rule in Occupied Europe
. London: Allen Lane.

For life in Britain after the war, I have used Maureen Waller (2004)
London 1945: Life in the Debris of the War
. London: Murray.

My understandings of Belsen and its liberation were assisted by the eyewitness account of a British officer involved in the liberation of the camp, Derrick Sington (1946)
Belsen Uncovered
. London: Duckworth, and by a recent retrospective account, Ben Shephard (2005)
After Daybreak: The Liberation of Belsen, 1945
. London: Cape. My account of the arrival in Berlin by the Red Army and the rape of civilians was prompted by
A Woman in Berlin
(2005) New York: Metropolitan Books, written anonymously by an author who was subsequently discovered to be Marta Hillers, a journalist who had studied at the Sorbonne, travelled in Europe, and lived through the Russian invasion of Berlin. The bombing of Hamburg derives from Hans Nossack (2004)
The End: Hamburg 1943
. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. A detailed account of the bombing of Germany by the Allies, including the numbers of raids on individual cities and casualty figures of civilians, is by Jörg Friedrich (2006)
The Fire: The Bombing of Germany 1940-1945
. New York: Columbia University Press.

Books I have used on German people's conversion to Nazism include: Wibke Bruhns (2008)
My Father's Country: The Story of a German Family
. Toronto: Doubleday Canada; Eric A. Johnson and Karl-Heinz Reuband (2005)
What We Knew: Terror, Mass Murder and Everyday Life in Nazi Germany, an Oral History
. New York: Basic Books; and Claudia Koonz (2003)
The Nazi Conscience
. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

For the plans for a German invasion of Britain, I used
German Invasion Plans for the British Isles 1940
, Military High Command, Berlin, translated and reissued (2007). Oxford: The Bodleian Library. The life of Sophie and Hans Scholl is described by their sister Inge Scholl (1970)
The White Rose: Munich 1942-1943
. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, and by Annette Dumbach and Jud Newborn (2006)
Sophie Scholl and the White Rose
. Oxford: Oneworld Publications. It is also dramatized in Marc Rothemund's film (2005)
Sophie Scholl — Die letzten Tage
. The sense of separation from the ordinary world experienced by people who have been in combat now tends to be described in the psychiatric literature as a syndrome of post-traumatic stress disorder, previously known as shell shock; I have drawn on Chris Brewin (2003)
Post Traumatic Stress Disorder: Malady or Myth
. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, and also on the literary depiction of the sense of separation from civil life in Erich Maria Remarque (1929)
All Quiet on the Western Front
. New York: Vintage (current edition 1996).

Quotations from newspapers are fully attributed where they occur.

Werner's idea that telepathy couldn't work because minds are too different is due to a friend, Stevie Draper. George's idea of a novel about hermaphrodites who take on one or the other sex before they make love is Ursula LeGuin's; she wrote about it in her 1969 novel
The Left Hand of Darkness
. New York: Ace Books.

The book of Erich Auerbach that Anna mentions is his 1929
Dante: Poet of the Secular World
, reissued (2007). New York: New York Review Books.

Werner's sentiment, “When you listen to Hitler you know he is a good person,” was expressed by the mother of a German woman who worked as an au pair in England before the war, and was related to me by a friend, Nicholas Bielby.

Some of my account of Belsen is taken from a three-page carbon copy that I received from my father, Harold Oatley, who was a medical officer attached to an artillery regiment of the 52nd Lowland Division (which I describe George as belonging to). He appears as Harold in this book. The impressions of Belsen three days after it was overrun by the British are my father's at that time. They were taken directly from what he wrote, and I have used some of his phrases. The account of a general practice in the Caledonian Road, and the medicines dispensed there, derive from a reminiscence of my father.

The training of the 52nd Lowland Division in mountain warfare was described to me by my father and is described also by George Blake (1950)
Mountain and Flood: A History of the 52nd (Lowland) Division 1939-1946
. Glasgow: Jackson & Co. A description of Bremen at the end of the war, which includes photographs of the devastation, also appears in this book. The comments (which I attribute to a Cameronian major whom I imagined) on the riots in Bremen at the end of April 1945, and the political stupidity of the German electorate in 1933, are taken directly from pp. 203-204 of Blake's book.

The quotation from Hitler on his pedagogy is from Peter Sichrovsky (1988)
Born Guilty: Children of Nazi Families
. New York: Basic Books, p. 169. A different translation of the same speech, attributed to Hitler at a Nuremberg Rally, appears in Annette Dumbach and Jud Newborn (2006)
Sophie Scholl and the White Rose
. Oxford: Oneworld Publications, p. 25.

The text of leaflets dropped on Germany declaring cities and civilian life to be military targets is from Jörg Friedrich (2006)
The Fire: The Bombing of Germany 1940-1945
. New York: Columbia University Press, p. 198. This book is also the source (p. 295) of a précis I give of a woman caught in a cellar during a bombing raid.

The phrase about the duty of people at the negotiating table being to have Hitler locked up is from Sebastian Haffner (1940)
Germany Jekyll and Hyde: A Contemporary Account of Nazi Germany
. London: Secker and Warburg, reissued (2008) Abacus. This is an extraordinarily perceptive view of Nazi Germany by a journalist who, as early as 1939, saw Hitler as a criminal and the Nazis as self-serving thugs with trademark anti-Semitism. Haffner's 2002 memoir of growing up in Germany,
Defying Hitler: A Memoir
. New York: Picador, has also been a valuable source.

Ethel Mannin's poem “Song of the Bomber” is to be found in Catherine Reilly (ed.) (1997)
The Virago Book of Women's War Poetry and Verse
. London: Virago, p. 215.

Instructions for British Servicemen in Germany 1944
, first published by The Foreign Office, 1944, were reissued (2007) Oxford: The Bodleian Library, and I have used some quotations from this source.