Greg Iles - Black Cross

Rachel noticed the prisoners more than the guards. They traveled in small groups, most often with those who shared the same badge color. Asocial with asocial, political with political, criminal with criminal, Jew with Jew. Above all she watched the children. Many clung to their mothers’ shifts, as Jan and Hannah did whenever possible, but others seemed to have free run of the camp. Like a grimy-faced army of midget partisans, they darted in and out of alleys, crouched under steps, squabbled in the barracks, spied on everyone and stole anything that wasn’t guarded or nailed down, including food from those too old or weak to protect themselves.

Rachel found it all bewildering. For four years she had heard that the camps in the East were labor camps. Totenhausen was more like a sanitarium, except that its staff was homicidally insane and armed to the teeth. There was little to do but idly pass the time and hope to avoid random death — unless of course you counted Frau Hagan as your friend.

This morning the Block Leader had ordered Rachel to memorize the layout of the camp, pointing out which buildings were to be avoided and which areas were safe from the view of the tower gunners. The task did not take long. Totenhausen was surprisingly small, and laid out with the usual German precision. In a perfect square of electrified barbed wire, the inmate blocks occupied the west side and the SS barracks the east, these alternate universes separated by the Appellplatz, where roll was taken twice each day, once in the morning and once at night. The administration building and officers’ quarters stood at the front of the camp and faced south, towards the river, which flowed less than forty meters from the main gate. And backed against the wooded hills at the rear of the camp was Brandt’s “hospital,” with the half-buried E-Block squatting in its shadow like a vicious dog in uneasy sleep. The only building which compared to the hospital in size was a large wooden barn which occupied the entire northeast corner of the camp, and was surrounded by a ten-foot wire fence.

“That is where they make the gas?” Rachel asked, pointing to the tops of two brick smokestacks that jutted from openings in the high barn roof.

Frau Hagan quickly crossed herself. “The furnace of the devil,” she said softly. “Don’t point.”

“I thought you were a Communist,” said Rachel. “Communists don’t believe in God, do they?”

Frau Hagan pulled her gray coat around her. “God may be dead, Dutch girl, but the devil is alive and well. I’m getting cold. Let’s walk.”

They skirted the factory fence until they reached the SS barracks, then cut between the barracks and the dog kennels. Rachel felt a prickle on her skin as she passed the watchful shepherds.

A sudden wild shouting from the direction of the Appellplatz made her cringe.

“Football,” Frau Hagan said without breaking stride.

Rachel squeezed her nails into her palms and walked on. “What happened early this morning?” she asked. “I heard screaming and shouting in the yard.”

Frau Hagan sighed wearily and kicked a mound of snow. “The Gypsy woman tried to run to the wire. Someone stopped her. They should have let her go.”

Rachel was horrified. “To the electric fence?”

“Of course. It happened all the time at Auschwitz. It’s the most popular method of suicide there. The wire could have ended it for the Gypsy. Now something worse will happen. Maybe for all of us.”

“What do you mean?”

Hagan turned her flat face to Rachel as she walked. “If they took your child from you, Dutch girl, what would you do?”

“I would go mad.”

“Just so. And a madwoman is capable of anything. Very dangerous for the rest of us.”

Hagan stopped, stretched her thick arms, then methodically bent and touched her toes several times. “Exercise,” she puffed. “I know how shocking it is. You heard the talk. Yes, the distinguished Doctor Brandt is the pederast. There are some among the prisoners too, but Brandt is the worst. That mongrel Weitz brings them to him. One, sometimes two little boys in a month since the family camp ruse started. So, you see? The world is turned upside down. It would have been better for the Gypsy and her son to have been gassed at Chelmno than to have been saved and brought here.”

“Can’t we do anything to help the boy?” Rachel asked, thinking of her hidden diamonds. “Couldn’t we bribe someone?”

Frau Hagan looked puzzled. “Bribe them to do what? Kill the boy? That is his only escape from here. And if something happens to that boy, Brandt will merely send Weitz for another. Perhaps your Jan.”

Rachel shuddered. “What about that nurse? Anna Kaas. Can’t she do something?”

Frau Hagan grabbed Rachel by the shoulders and shook her violently. “Are you a fool after all? Never again mention that name in the yard! Never! Do you understand?”

“I — yes. I mean, I won’t.”

“Since this whole insanity began, she is the only German I have seen do anything to help prisoners. The only one .” The Pole shook Rachel again. “Her life cannot be risked in a useless attempt to save a doomed child. Put that out of your stupid head!”

Rachel jerked away, but before she had gone five steps Frau Hagan caught her by the arm. “Not so fast, Dutch girl. You talk of bribes. What have you got to bribe with ?”

“Nothing.” Rachel’s face grew hot. “Only my food, like everyone else.”

“Sergeant Sturm has been questioning people, you know. He’s asking about some diamonds he says were lost in the yard the night of the last selection.”

“I don’t know anything about that.” Rachel immediately regretted her lie. Frau Hagan could order her searched anytime, and she knew every trick of concealment. She would search Rachel’s inner body first .

“Someone said it was your idiot father-in-law who had the diamonds. You still don’t know about it?”

“No. I mean I didn’t know he had the diamonds, not until that night. Major Schörner made Sturm throw them into the yard.”

Frau Hagan considered this. “That night, after the selection . . . you went to the toilet. You stayed a long time.”

“My children were sick.”

Frau Hagan’s gaze didn’t waver.

“The diamonds were in the Appellplatz!” Rachel blurted. “On the other side of the fence!”

“You could have climbed the fence.”

“And left my children behind?” Rachel recalled the wild moment of madness it had taken to let go of Jan and Hannah’s little hands and climb the cold wire. “If I were caught doing that I would never have seen them again!”

Frau Hagan nodded. “That is true, Dutch girl. I wonder if you have that much courage?”

“I assure you I don’t.”

“So if I searched you now I would find no diamonds?”

“No.”

The Block Leader cocked her square head to one side. “Did you see anyone else that night, when you went to the toilet?”

Rachel felt cornered. She hesitated, but then, feeling like a traitor, she said, “The shoemaker. I saw him outside the block fence that night.”

Frau Hagan’s eyes flashed with satisfaction. “I should have known.”

“You won’t tell Sturm?”

More yells sounded from the direction of the main gate.

“Come on, Dutch girl.” Frau Hagan pulled her along.

Emerging from behind the headquarters building, Rachel saw a dozen SS men stripped to their brown undershirts charging wildly around the parade ground in their knee boots. Sergeant Sturm was leading one team in a game of soccer in which a couple of large ammunition crates served as goals. A fairly large audience of both prisoners and SS men had gathered to watch the game, as there was no physical barrier separating the SS parade ground from the Appellplatz.