Christopher Priest - The Separation

‘Hold it steady,’ he said.

He clambered up into the van compartment, bending double, and pushed our bags of kit away from the side where they were piled up. There seemed to be several more cases and boxes than I remembered bringing with us when we left home.

‘Over here!’ he said, waving his hand with an annoyed gesture. ‘Don’t point the light at me.’

A mattress had been placed on the floor of the van, concealed until now by the bags and cases Joe had stacked alongside it. The mattress itself was covered by a wooden board of some kind, leaning at a forty-five-degree angle against the wall of the van to make a cramped, triangular space beneath. Joe was kneeling on the edge of the mattress, pulling the board away. As soon as he did so I realized that there was someone lying underneath it. The figure exclaimed loudly in German and made an irate movement, pushing at the board from below and sitting upright as soon as there was enough space to do so.

It was a young woman, but because of the angle of the torch beam I did not recognize her at first. Joe took her hands and helped her out, and as soon as I was able to see her properly I realized it was Birgit, the daughter of the family we had been staying with in Berlin.

Joe tried to embrace her but she pushed him away angrily.

"[Why have you taken so long?]’ she cried. ‘[I’ve been trapped for hours! I couldn’t move, couldn’t breathe, I’m dying of thirst!]’

‘[I stopped as soon as I thought it would be safe,]’Joe said. ‘[I was held up in Berlin, waiting for him.]’

He jabbed his thumb in my direction. At least some of Joe’s earlier impatience was explained, but many other questions remained glaringly unanswered. For a few minutes there was a noisy scene between the three of us, there under the darkness of the trees, with Birgit angry and Joe defensive, while I was thoroughly confused and unable to get replies to the string of questions I felt had to be asked.

Birgit’s unexpected appearance caused an explosion of feelings in me that I could never explain to Joe. I had never discussed her with him, so I assumed, partly because it suited me to assume, that he had no interest in her. However, thoughts of her had haunted my every moment since we had arrived in Berlin. She was the most beautiful young woman I had ever seen or met. Her lively, amusing personality had smitten me, provoking wild fantasies which I reluctantly suppressed. When she picked up the violin and became absorbed in her music I simply doted on her. I managed a few short conversations with her, but most of our contact had been during the family meals. I had not been able to take my eyes off her. She ravished me with her looks, her laugh, her sensitive intelligence. When I was away from that apartment in Goethestrasse I could hardly dare think of her, so turbulent were my feelings about her, yet I could barely think of anything or anyone else.

Things eventually quietened down. My eyes began to adjust to the gloom so that it was no longer so profoundly dark around us. I could see that Joe and Birgit were standing side by side, leaning back against the van.

I said, ‘Would you mind telling me what’s been going on, Joe?’

‘[Speak in German so Birgit can follow what we’re saying.]’

‘She speaks English well enough,’ I said, sulkily.

‘[We’re still in her country. Let’s make it as easy for her as possible.]’

‘[All right, Joe. What’s happening?]’

‘[Birgit is going to travel back to England with us. She has to leave Germany as soon as possible.]’

‘[Why?]’

Joe said to Birgit, ‘[It is exactly as I was telling you. People like JL haven’t the faintest idea what Hitler has been doing to the Jews in this country.]’

‘[You needn’t patronize me,]’ I said, stung by his words, but more so by the way he tried to belittle me in front of Birgit. ‘[I can read the newspapers.]’

‘[Yes, but you don’t act on what you read.]’

‘[How can you say that?]’ I retorted. ‘[If you felt as strongly as that, you wouldn’t have come to Germany for the Games.]’

‘[I couldn’t tell you before,]’Joe said quietly. ‘[I was going to try to convince you we should stay away. After all the training we’ve done I wasn’t sure how I could tell you, or what I could say to persuade you, but that’s how I was feeling. Then Mum told me about Birgit, how desperate the situation had become in Berlin for Jews, and that she was desperate to help. You know she and Hanna Sattmann were brought up together. The truth is that the main reason I came to Germany was not to race, but to try to bring Birgit out with us.]’

‘[JL, he’s right about the situation,]’ said Birgit, her head turning from one of us to the other. ‘[You can’t know what it’s been like for us. But neither can you, Joe. No more than any of the visitors who have come from abroad for the Games. The Nazis have been pulling down their banners, cleaning slogans off the walls, allowing Jewish shops and restaurants to open up again, to make foreigners think that what they’ve been told about the persecution of Jews is untrue. As soon as the Games are over, they’ll start up on us again.]’

She gulped, then fell silent. In the darkness I could see she was pressing her hands over her eyes. Joe leaned towards her, apparently trying to console her, but she pushed him aside. In the gloom I saw her move away from the van, stepping into the darker area beneath the nearest trees. I could hear her crying.

My heart impelled me to run across to her, hold her, comfort her, but in the last few minutes I had started to realize how little I really knew about her or her life. For that matter, too, how little I understood about what the Nazis had been doing to the Jews in Germany.

Here again, the time I am describing seems an age ago. Postwar hindsight threatens the accuracy of my memories, in particular the reliability of my remembered sensibilities. This was 1936. The concentration camps and the extermination camps, Himmler’s Einsatzgruppen, the vile medical experiments on prisoners, the forced labour and starvation, the gas chambers, all these lay years ahead. To say that Joe and I could not have known about the growing persecution would be facile, but even had we been blessed or cursed with foresight, who could have believed how it would in reality grow?

Yet the clues were in place. They were nakedly exposed in the speeches of Adolf Hitler, there for anyone to understand them, if they took the trouble. Rudolf Hess was no better, but he was not so well known at that time outside Germany. Although it was Hitler who announced the Nuremberg Laws, the series of measures that removed all civil, legal and humanitarian rights from the Jews, and which Birgit was in effect beginning to tell us about, it was Hess who had enacted them and it was Hess’s signature on the orders.

Again, Joe and I were two naive young men from a relatively sheltered background, whose principal interest was sport. Perhaps I was more naive than Joe, but it was true of us both. We were not untypical. Even those who should have known better, the politicians and diplomats of the Western democracies, clearly did not realize the enormity of what was happening in Germany. Perhaps they suspected more than they admitted, but they have claimed since that they did not. There was some mitigation: nothing like it had ever happened before, or not on such a scale, so it was easier to try to believe something else, to hope for the best. But those few minutes, in the hush of the silent forest, turned out to be the beginning of an education for me.

I sat down on the carpet of pine needles, away from the other two, thinking that my presence was only adding to the confusion. I certainly realized that the turbulence of my feelings and wishes meant that I was likely to say or do something I would quickly regret. I watched the indistinct dark shapes of the other two, visible against the white-painted background of the van. Birgit was sobbing quietly; Joe was talking to her. Either I could not hear what they were saying, or I closed my mind to it. Gradually she calmed.