Peter Davies - The Welsh Girl

“I remember some things.”

“But not this? So how can you say for sure you weren’t a party to it?”

“That,” Hess says quietly, “I think I’d recall.” He blinks. “To have done such things and not remember them…”

“You believe me, then? That they’re true?” Rotheram asks, and Hess turns away, stares out the side window at the scenery gliding past. Rotheram feels sure he’s going to deny it, and then Hess nods, almost imperceptibly, and Rotheram shudders, oddly disappointed, as if he’d been the one asking Hess if the films were true, praying they weren’t.

Most of the POWs he’s shown the films to vehemently refuse to believe them. They claim they were made in Hollywood. One actually swore that he recognized Gregory Peck playing an officer. Even those who acknowledge the footage is real claim the voice-over is a lie, that the dead aren’t Jews but cholera victims in India, or German POWs in Belgium, where the camps are reputed to be disease-ridden. He’d seen men weep at that last thought. Despicable as their denials are, they seem almost desperately innocent to Rotheram, and he’s come to doubt the War Office’s policy of showing the newsreels to the men, obliging them to watch them.

They’re never told what’s coming; just another newsreel, another feature, they think. Rotheram stands at the back of the mess hall as the lights go down and the projector begins to whir. There’s the usual murmur of conversation at first — once the Pathé News cockerel has been greeted with clucking — and then a slow stifling of the noise. The first thing to get the men’s attention are the fences, the barbed wire, and the low barrack huts. For a second, Rotheram is convinced, the men must wonder if they’re about to see themselves up there onscreen, larger than life.

It’s his job, thankfully, to watch them, the prisoners, rather than the film. He stares at the way their cigarette smoke swims up through the rays of the projector like watery ghosts, or how the reflected light silvers their shoulders, yet still he finds his eye drawn back to the screen, catching fragments of footage. A hut being burned to the ground with a flamethrower. The blank, masked faces of onlookers, local people, soldiers. An arm slipping off the side of a cart, swinging there lazily, almost gaily, like a hand trailed in water. A wave of corpses breaking before a tractor blade.

Afterwards, when the reel runs out, the film fluttering in the gate like a caught thing, the screen goes white, bathing them in it’s searing light as if for a flash photograph. Rotheram snaps the projector off and in the darkness there’s silence. None of the men know what to do, how to react. It’s as if they’re waiting, waiting for the reel to be changed, waiting for the film, the main feature, wondering what could follow that, what could make them forget. But of course, the show’s over.

Rotheram knows of only one prisoner who’s accepted the films completely — a fellow who claimed to have seen his own mother among the local German women brought to Belsen to bear witness — and he’d been beaten black and blue by the others. Rotheram knows the films are true, yet they’re being used as propaganda. At heart, he’s simply not sure how or even if men can be forced to believe such things.

He can hardly bear to believe them himself.

He recalls becoming furious with his own mother once when she made him read a report about concentration camps in the newspaper. This would have been in 1937, less than a year after they’d arrived in Britain. She had him read aloud to her to improve his rusty English, but he hated it when she corrected his accent. He kept at it only because it was better than being goaded by the local children, calling him Adolf whenever he opened his mouth. She insisted he learn the language as a boy—“it’s your mother tongue, after all”—but he always chafed at it. For once she’d fallen silent as he read, and he thought he must be doing well, until he looked at her and saw she was crying. “Such terrible things,” she told him when she had recovered herself, and he looked at the paper in his hands in surprise. He’d been concentrating so hard on his pronunciation, he could barely recall a word of what he’d read. He set it down, shook his head when she asked him to go on.

“Not if it’s going to torture you. Besides,” he said, “it may not even be true.”

He meant it to comfort her, but she looked at him fiercely, and he’d become defensive. She insisted they speak English to each other, but it frustrated him, made him strident. Even now, after they’d escaped, he felt their old fight about fleeing Germany still smoldering between them. He had tried to tell himself he’d done it for her, but in his heart he knew she’d made them leave for his sake. You want me to be afraid, he’d told her once, and she’d said, I’m your mother. I’m afraid for you.

“Weren’t you the one,” he said, “who told me about the Britfish during the last war, their propaganda about German soldiers eating babies, raping nuns. They said that about men like my father.” He folded the paper. “So how can you know that these things are true?”

“Even if they’re half true, they’re terrible enough,” she admonished him. “I hope they’re not true, but I fear they are.”

“Fear,” he sneered. “Fear will make you believe anything.” Yet sometimes, he thought bleakly, he wanted the stories to be true, desperately, cravenly desired them to be the very worst things, the most terrible atrocities, however unbelievable, if only because it would mean he had run for a reason.

He looks across at Hess now, huddled in the corner of the car.

“But how can you believe me?” Rotheram explodes. “How can you believe… that? Those pictures. How can you just take my word for it?” He stares at him aghast, as though if the films are true, Hess can’t exist; if Hess exists, a man sitting in a car having a conversation, the films can’t be true.

And without turning, as if thinking aloud, Hess tells him.

“You have to remember how successful we were, how much we’d achieved. Seizing power, reclaiming the Rhineland. Austria! We would look at each other and shake our heads in wonder. How could such things happen? You might think we were driven mad by power, but we — I don’t speak for him, but the rest of us — we were the opposite of arrogant, we were humbled by these successes, we couldn’t believe we’d achieved such things. Perhaps it was luck, but once you have enough luck, it starts to feel like fate. Like tossing a coin, having it come down heads again and again. Once or twice is nothing, but five times, ten? It’s shocking. But how can you stop? So we set our sights higher. Poland, Holland, France. What next? What could top what had come before? The Soviet Union! We knew it was impossible, but everything else before it had been impossible.” He shook his head. “And if you ask me, this… this thing was another impossibility. What if we eradicate a whole people? What if there were a world without Jews?”

“That’s enough!” It’s the most Hess has ever recalled, but all Rotheram wants is for him to shut up. Some questions, it occurs to him, should never be asked, let alone answered. But Hess seems not to hear him.

“It’s a hypothesis, you see, but the problem with a hypothesis is you don’t know it’s true until you test it. You can’t believe a thing is possible until you do it. Yet until you do it, why even ask if you should? There’s no morality about the impossible, Captain. To us, you must understand, this was like climbing Everest, like going to the moon. We couldn’t believe such a thing was possible, and that’s how we could do it.”

Hess looks over, almost beseeching, but Rotheram leans back against the upholstery, as if exhausted. It’s madness, he knows now, and it comes to him forcefully how truly vain this mission has been from the start. Hess is mad, but not just now, not temporarily, not simply since his flight to Britain. He’s always been mad, all of them have been, all the monsters and butchers. Lucidly mad, rationally mad, functionally mad. Under any other circumstances he’d say Hess was unfit for trial, and yet it’s his very madness that demands to be tried.