John Gardner - Man From Barbarossa

She nodded fiercely.

‘It’s okay. I am one of the few people who has the whole story. This is why you wanted to be with us? Because they were here?’

‘Yes,’ she whispered. ‘But something truly terrible will happen. We must try to find a way to get out. All of us. Pete and my parents as well. Look for any way of escape, James. Please look hard. The Chushi Pravosudia are obviously using actors from various companies throughout the Soviet Union for this charade. My parents were in a theatre company based in Leningrad. That’s where they went after they staged the accident.’

They went on washing each other, going through the ballet they were quickly perfecting. Bond asked if she knew why it had been necessary to use two technicians from England to do the camera work when any Russian team would have done it just as well. She had no idea. ‘I think, however, that we shall all be disposed of as soon as the video is completed. Nobody will be left, but there is more to it than this.’

They slept in each other’s arms that night, rising at dawn, when summoned, to begin another day with the horrors of the past.

More and more witnesses were taped, each with his or her terrible description of life at Sobibór which was run like a sickening mass production factory, the final product being dead Jewish people.

They described how the Germans and their Ukrainian turncoat assistants had meticulously organised the place. It was similar to all the nauseating stories anyone had heard of the Nazi death camps. It was the efficiency that was as distressing as the amoral mass executions. All those who gave evidence were people who had been saved from the gas chambers either by their skills or strength. Some had been tailors or cobblers, working in special areas for the camp staff. Others had escaped by doing the revolting work – the picking over of possessions left by an intake of prisoners, the ‘dentists’ whose job it was to remove gold teeth from the victims and the sanitation squads who cleaned out the cattle trucks in which the doomed were transported to the camp. One old woman told how her entire time at Sobibór had been spent in a shop which specialised in picking the yellow Star of David patches from the discarded clothing of victims.

The witnesses had been trained by experts, so when he was behind the camera, Bond knew, with part of his mind, that they were actors performing as former victims. Yet the achievement of these men and women was so real, so brilliantly good, that as the day wore on, he became deeply depressed and mentally torn by the endless abominable repetitions.

It was late on the second afternoon that he realised some of the actors were appearing more than once – giving evidence, then being freshly made-up to return and perform as a new character with a slightly different story.

Michael Brooks himself came on to the witness stand for a second time towards the end of the day. Ordinarily, Bond would never have recognised him, now an old, bent and quavering man. It was the face behind the mask that Bond saw clearly and this performance was bravura. The old man told of one day at the camp, a day when the camp was visited by the architect of the so-called ‘Final Solution’, the Holocaust – Heinrich Himmler himself. On that day a special train arrived with several hundred Jewish girls from a labour camp in the Lublin district. Himmler watched the whole extermination process from arrival to the end.

‘He gave no sign of remorse,’ the aged Jew, who was Michael Brooks, told the ‘court’. ‘He simply watched each phase with a growing interest. The victims might have been cattle for all the humanity Himmler showed. I was near the party when they left. I spoke some German in those days. Before he got into his car, Himmler said to the commandant, “You’re doing well, but if things go as they should, you’ll get some bottlenecks. That could prove difficult. I will order more chambers to be built. You need to be able to process more. I’ll see to it.” Those were the words he used, “to process more”.’

They wrapped up for the day and Clive came down on to the sound stage floor. ‘They’re expecting some big cheese from Moscow tonight.’ He looked tired, as though he also felt the strain. ‘I’ll be up late in the editing suite. I’ve got permission for you to take a walk outside so that you can get fresh air.’ The effect of the day seemed to have removed his cheery, camp manner. ‘It’s quite cold, and you can’t go far, but I think it might do you good.’

Bond, Nina, Pete Natkowitz and three of the wardrobe people went outside through a door which led directly from the sound stage. They could not speak freely because of the wardrobe trio, and the darkness hit them like a wall, so that it took several minutes for their eyes to adjust. Then the lights around the Hôtel de la Justice came on and Bond realised why he had thought it familiar. From the outside it looked like some large medieval monastery fashioned in wood. He had once seen a drawing of a building just like this one. There was even a hexagonal gate tower, projecting from one side of the building, while the arched windows in perfect rows along the exterior could easily have been the windows to monastic cells.

The place had been built in a great circular clearing cut out of the forest. It must have measured a good half-mile across, and the perimeter where the clearing turned into thick woodland was lined with a high fence of barbed wire. It was lit at intervals by small floodlights, giving all of them the impression that they were at this moment in the awful camp of which they had heard so much during the day.

In the trees behind the perimeter, Bond thought he could sense movement. He saw nothing but experience told him there were armed men hidden in the forest. Nina was probably right. Nobody who worked on this video would be allowed to leave. The Hôtel de la Justice would become their own personal death camp.

As they returned to the door, through which they had been allowed to leave, floodlights came to life on the far side of the building, revealing a circular hard standing marked with a white H. As the dazzling illuminations cleaned the darkness around this area the sound of helicopter engines roared in from above, getting louder until one of the machines dropped neatly from the sky and settled on the pad.

About a dozen men emerged from its body and were met by men in uniform who rose up out of the ground and ran forward to help them. As soon as this group had disembarked, the helicopter took off, to be replaced by a smaller machine from which three men climbed and walked briskly towards another knot of figures who seemed to be a special reception committee. Just before the lights flicked off, Bond saw men exchanging salutes. The leader of the arriving group was tall, silhouetted for a moment. There was something forbiddingly familiar about him, even at this distance. Throughout the night his shape returned again and again to Bond’s mind, but he could not think who the man might be. He was certain of one thing, that should they escape it would not be through the trees, for they were a killing ground.

In the early hours, Nina cried out, coming to the surface from some dreadful nightmare. She clung to Bond as though the spectres from Sobibór were at her heels. ‘James,’ she whispered in terror, her body soaked with sweat, ‘I dreamed we were all there. You understand? All?’

He shushed her, making the noises with which one calms a child.

‘Bory was sending us all to the showers,’ she sobbed. The showers were the gas chambers. The victims were told they had to shower before being given camp uniforms. Inside the showers they were gassed. In the first year or so of Sobibór’s macabre history, they had used primitive methods and the gas had been carbon monoxide produced by a 200-horsepower engine in a shed near the showers. Later they progressed to the lethal Zyklon B, hydrogen cyanide, manufactured in Frankfurt and Hamburg.