David Gibbins - The Mask of Troy

‘Still a big if.’ Mayne leaned back. He had meant to ask, but could not. It would do no good to know. It was almost beyond contemplation. He thought of the terrible grind of the war since Normandy, all the friends he had lost, the killing he himself had done, then the dreadful camp, all of those deaths, the girl with the harp, what had happened to her in this forest. Was all of that a price that had been paid to get them, the two of them, by chance, to where they were now, this day? He shut the thought from his mind. He took a deep breath and knelt up, checking his watch. ‘Right. I think I need a breather from this place. From everything you’ve just been saying. Let’s get back. Lewes should be setting out from Corps HQ by now. Knowing him, he’ll be early. Doesn’t like to leave me alone. We can meet him at the camp gate.’

There was a rustle in the foliage behind them. Mayne spun round, revolver at the ready. A man lurched out, dressed in the tattered blue-striped uniform of a camp inmate. His arms were up, hands open towards them. His head was roughly shaven and he was gaunt-faced, his eyes sunken. ‘ Juden. Juden,’ he said in a cracked voice, pointing at himself with one hand, gesturing desperately with the other at Mayne’s revolver. He pulled back his left sleeve and revealed a tattoo like the one the nurse had shown them on the child from Auschwitz, but raw, inflamed. Stein put his hand on Mayne’s arm and he slowly lowered the pistol. Stein waved at the man to calm down. ‘ Shalom aleichem,’ he said.

‘ Aleichem shalom,’ the man replied, looking pathetically grateful. Stein spoke urgently with him in Yiddish, asking short questions and the man answering rapidly, several times pointing to the structure behind them and then down the side of the building, where all Mayne could see was the buried concrete wall. Stein put his hand up to silence the man and turned to Mayne. ‘I think he’s genuine. He says he’s Hungarian Jewish.’

‘There were Hungarian fascists among the Waffen SS we captured at Cassino,’ Mayne murmured, his finger still on the trigger. ‘Not Jews, of course, but some of them knew Yiddish and could pass muster.’

‘He speaks the Hungarian dialect of Yiddish flawlessly. I know it, because my mother’s family were originally from the German borderland near Hungary.’

Mayne pursed his lips. ‘So what’s his story?’

‘He says he was one of the final batch who were deported by the Nazis from Budapest to Auschwitz, late last year. He was selected for something called the Zondercommando, Jewish assistants who cleared the bodies from the gas chambers and then burned them.’

‘He told you that?’

‘That’s what I mean. Why tell something like that if you’re spinning a tale?’

‘Because it makes the story more convincing. Go on.’

Stein saw Mayne’s concern, and paused. ‘He said he was singled out with several others and brought here about three months ago. He said the Nazis were always bringing small batches of healthy young men to the camp. That’s exactly what Cameron told us. They were kept separate from the others, well fed, then brought into this building. None of them came out alive. The bodies were never sent to the camp crematorium but were buried in a deep lime-filled pit on the edge of the forest, by men in protective overalls and gas masks.’

‘He must have overheard us talking about the virus. That sounds like confirmation of experimentation on humans. Exactly what we might want to hear.’

Stein looked uncertain. ‘He says he doesn’t speak English. Look at him. He doesn’t understand a word we’re saying. He says he and several others escaped into the forest five days ago. They’ve been hunting down and killing any of the former SS guards they’ve found hiding out here. That’s also what we heard was going on.’

‘Strange they didn’t get that woman, the Lagerfuherin. Her disguise wasn’t going to fool anyone.’

‘I mentioned that to him. Apparently she only fled into the forest yesterday, when the troops arrived. But this man and his comrades didn’t want to put themselves at any more risk. Once the camp was liberated, they just wanted to survive. They knew she’d be caught eventually, precisely because she made so little effort to disguise herself. He said that he and the others just wanted to wait for Allied soldiers like us to arrive so they could show the world this place. I told him the forest was due to be bombed, that it was time to leave. He got agitated. You saw that. Went very pale. He said we had to see what was inside the bunker then, immediately. They’ve got the keys. They took them off a dead SS man. He knows another way in.’

‘You mean where he was gesturing?’

‘Around the corner. Behind those fallen logs. Apparently, it’s where they used to take the bodies out.’

Mayne took a deep breath. He felt a sudden jolt of pain in the old wound in his shoulder, cutting into him like a knife, but he kept steady and gestured with his revolver. ‘All right. We haven’t got time for more of this. We need to get back to Lewes. Tell him to show us the way. Quickly.’

Stein spoke in Yiddish to the man, who put his hands down, nodded enthusiastically and scurried towards the corner of the concrete wall about five metres beyond the barred door. Mayne and Stein followed him around the corner, ducking beneath a jumble of logs and cut boughs that partly concealed a ramp leading down at a low angle along the side of the building, ending about three metres below the level of the surrounding forest. It was a loading bay, wide enough for a small lorry to back down. On the side of the building was a jumble of cut logs that Mayne guessed had been dropped there within the past few weeks to hide the entrance.

The man began to shift the logs aside, working with ease. Mayne remembered his story. His strength seemed plausible. In the death camps, only the most proficient workers would have been kept alive, and this man’s job at Auschwitz had been to haul and stack bodies. Even so, his wiry frame concealed remarkable strength for one who had eaten little for weeks. Perhaps the adrenalin of the moment was what kept him going, if liberation was what he and his comrades had been waiting for. Mayne kept his revolver unholstered, but lowered it. The man pushed aside the final log to reveal a metal door, smaller than the other entrance. He straightened up, wiping his brow, then produced a key from the chain around his neck and inserted it in the padlock that hung from a massive metal latch across the door. The lock sprang open and he removed it, dropping it to the ground. He swung open the latch, pushing the door inwards, then reached inside and switched on a light, before turning and speaking quickly to Stein in Yiddish. Stein followed and gestured back to Mayne. ‘He says the place has its own generator, but after the Allied bombing of the hydroelectric power stations last year, they installed a couple of charged-up U-boat batteries for back-up. There’s enough electricity to keep the basic amenities going for years, decades. They needed it for dehumidifiers, apparently, and other equipment.’

Mayne peered in. ‘I wonder what that equipment might have been,’ he murmured. ‘Dehumidifiers I can understand, though. It must get damp down here. A problem for storage.’ He followed Stein into a dimly lit corridor about ten metres long. At either end were glass-fronted booths, evidently security posts. He peered into the booth at the entrance. Everything still seemed in place, as if it had been hastily abandoned, the phone still on its receiver, and stationery and other paraphernalia neatly arranged. The man spoke in Yiddish again, and Stein looked back at Mayne. ‘Apparently it was only abandoned by the SS a few days ago, when they knew the camp was about to be surrendered. Our man says he and his comrades were waiting in the woods and ambushed the guards. This place was stocked up for a siege, and this is where he and his friend have been getting their food.’