David Gibbins - The Mask of Troy

They passed a man sitting with his back to a tree stump, one arm extended, rested on his knee, as if begging. He was wearing the tattered remnants of a blue striped uniform, like a patient’s hospital garb, smeared brown. His hair was cut to stubble and his face was emaciated: his skin taut, yellowish-grey, his eyes sunk deep in hollow sockets. Mayne stared at him. There were no eyes in the sockets. The man was long dead. He realized what the other piles of rags lying all around were, little clumps of decay all over the clearing. He stared ahead. They drove past the guards between the huts and veered right, then drew to a halt behind a line of soldiers with their backs to them, holding rifles at the ready with fixed bayonets.

Lewes switched off the ignition. Mayne could hear no talking, only a dull thumping sound. Through the line of soldiers he saw other people, around an open-backed truck. To the left a large pit had been dug in the ground, the size of a swimming pool. The pit was half filled with a grotesque entanglement of bodies, most of them naked, some with rags still clinging to them, a mass of skeletal limbs and wizened heads, hundreds of them. Two men in jackets with SS insignia were flinging in the bodies, one holding the fleshless ankles and the other the wrists, with the shaven heads lolling in between. Another SS man was in the pit, and another was on the back of the lorry, pushing the bodies to the rear to be taken off. Beyond the truck was a group of well-dressed men, women and children, evidently local civilians brought in to watch. The adults stood with arms folded, impassive, or too shocked to respond. One little girl was crying. Mayne and Cameron got out of the jeep. Lewes took out his unfinished cigarette, lit it and inhaled deeply. He caught the eye of the nearest soldier, jerked a thumb at the bayonet on his rifle, then gestured at the SS men. ‘Why don’t you fuckin’ pig-stick ’em, mate?’

The soldier turned. His eyes were dull, and his skin seemed to have taken on the hue of the place. ‘Later, mate. Don’t you worry about that. Later.’

Mayne cleared his throat, trying to control his nausea. He turned to Cameron. His voice sounded muffled, distant. ‘These SS men, the guards. How on earth have they survived?’

‘We were amazed they were still here to surrender. But they’re arrogant and defiant. They seem to have no idea of the crimes they’ve committed. Utterly indoctrinated. For them, the Jews, the Slavs are all animals, and they don’t understand how we don’t see that too. They’re even rather proud of some they’ve kept alive, rich Jews that Hitler wanted kept as ransom to their families in the West. Like all gangsters, the Nazis were perfectly able to put profit before ideology. We’ve even got the commandant, an SS – Untersturmfuhrer. He’ll stand trial. It’s important we don’t kill them all. But there are others hiding in the forest, being hunted by the more able-bodied of the inmates, those who only arrived here in the last days. It’s a kind of ghastly no-man’s-land out there, as if the hell of this place is seeping out like an infectious disease. They especially loathe the SS-Helferin, the female auxiliaries. One of the women still at large is the Lagerfuhrerin, the camp leader. She seems to have been a particularly vile bully. They think she’s hiding in the woods. They want to rip her to pieces.’

‘Can’t say I blame them,’ Mayne muttered, looking around.

‘I just want them to get it over and done with. My main job now is dealing with the typhus. We need to get the inmates all back in the camp for scrubbing and delousing. If typhus spreads among the local population and then gets into the advancing Allied troops, it could seriously impede the war effort.’ He gestured at the SS men. ‘And there’s another factor. Doing this job, helping us, is also their survival strategy. The more enthusiastically they help, the less likely we are to take revenge. That’s what they think. And they’re probably right. With each hour that passes, the horror will become part of our landscape, will become almost mundane. It’s a ghastly thing to say, but true. It’s our own survival strategy, mentally. The emotions switch off. We get numbed to it, just as they did. And they know it’s a relief for us to have them do this appalling job.’

Mayne stared at the scene, mesmerized, watching the SS men repeat the same odious task over and over again. It was like a medieval image of hell, like one of the punishments set in Hades to those condemned forever to repeat the same task, like Tantalus or Sisyphus. Only here the SS were not tormented by what they were doing. They almost seemed to be relishing it. He swallowed hard, and felt a cloying sensation at the back of his throat. He knew it must be the reek of this place, but he seemed no longer able to smell it, as if it had overwhelmed his senses. He suddenly felt tremulous all over, barely able to stand. He forced himself to concentrate on the scene, abstractly. He had tried his hand at painting before the war. He thought how he might frame the image, how he might capture his emotional response, refracted through his own experience. He watched a naked body sail through the air, a woman, her arms flung out before her, like a diver plunging into a swimming pool. But she was dead, and the swimming pool was a pit of rotting bodies. Mayne shook his head. Here, art as metaphor, art as suggestion, had no place. Here it could only be reality. Stark, unadorned reality. He turned to Cameron. ‘Is anyone photographing this?’

Cameron shook his head. ‘This place is top secret until you chaps give it the all-clear. Only essential army and medical personnel are allowed in. Bringing in those civilians to watch was understandable, but burdens us even more. I warned the CO but he’d made his mind up. With the typhus risk, they’ll have to be interned, probably until the war is over. But the horror’s on record, if that’s what you’re asking. The Army and Film Photographic Unit is at Belsen. Come on. I haven’t got much time. I need to supervise setting up those hospital tents.’

Mayne and Lewes followed him. Stein was still in the jeep, ashen-faced, wiping his mouth. Mayne could see that he had been sick. He climbed unsteadily out of the vehicle and followed them around the far side of the pit, towards the other line of barracks. On the open ground in front lay smouldering piles of rags, so impregnated with human grease that they burned like funeral pyres. They passed the entrance to the first of the barrack buildings, and Mayne stopped to peer in. It took him a moment to adjust to the gloom. All he could hear was the droning of flies. The air was fetid, humid. He had completely lost his sense of smell. He tried to look through the squalor, to remember what Cameron had said. They are human beings. The body nearest to him was naked, a man, the skin like parchment, discoloured with filth. He was lying on his back, his abdomen grotesquely hollow, as if he had been disembowelled, as if the life had been sucked out of him by that hurricane force that had blown the other man against the barbed-wire fence, the first body Mayne had seen in this place. His arms were outstretched, touching two other bodies that were curled up, facing away in opposite directions. Mayne saw no backdrop, only darkness, and as he stood aside to let the light in, the bodies seemed almost luminous, like a painting of Christ on the Cross and the two thieves. He swayed slightly, nearly retching. These were not images of atonement. These people did not die for the sins of mankind. They died horribly because the world had let it happen. He clenched his hands. This was reality. Stark reality.

He pushed away from the barrack entrance and went to where the others were waiting for him, further along the building. Lewes offered him a cigarette, but he shook his head. Stein turned to Cameron. ‘Before we go on. We know you’ve got to get back to your job. Is there anything more you can tell us? About what was going on in this place?’