Penguin Books Australia

Chapter 1

Last night he dreamed of it again: the armoured cars and troop carriers drove in convoy through the orchard, down an avenue of flowering fruit trees. Pink and white blossoms, like a delicate tapestry, filling the air with the fragrance of a spring day. In lush grass amid the rows of trees, tethered cattle grazed contentedly.

It was mid-April, 1945, and in two days' time he would be twenty-one years old. At home in the Weald of Kent, his old man would go down to The Oak and sink a few, and no doubt after a while declaim, 'For young Neil, on his twenty-first. Silly bugger could've stayed home on the farm, been in a protected occupation, instead of riskin' gettin' his balls shot off, fightin' for King and country.' And his cronies would all line up for another round of bitter, raise their glasses, and drink to Neil coming home with all his equipment intact, so some day there'd be a grandson.

Neil smiled. There had been times in these past two years when his dad was right. He had joined in haste, to escape the drudgery of their meagre small-holding, but often, in the bitter fighting across France and Germany, he would have gladly settled for the chores on their Wittersham farm. As if in memory of that, he could hear what seemed to be a tractor cutting hay in a distant field beyond the orchard; it might easily have been Kent, and the feeling of rural tranquillity in this pastoral landscape suddenly made the war seem far away.

It felt unreal.

There had been no fighting now for two days, forty-eight rare and precious hours in which they had killed no-one, encountered no enemy, heard no gunfire; heard nothing except the same recurrent rumours that a cease-fire was imminent. If it made them all feel full of optimism, it also made them afraid. No-one wanted to be killed in these final hours - if they were to be the final hours - but there seemed little chance of violence or ambush here in this remote, idyllic place, which the war had somehow miraculously left untouched.

Bees were humming in the silence when the signal was given and the engines stopped.

Bees, on a barely warm April day?

'Something rather odd,' Major Lacey said.

They watched him clamber awkwardly down from his carrier.

He was older than them, newly transferred from an ordnance depot and untested in battle. The hardened veterans had little time for him - despite their youth they were all trained commandos who had already lost three leaders since the Normandy landing - and there was muttering that if Lacey copped it, their next skipper would be straight from an entertainment unit or the catering corps. But for once, on this opinion of the major's, there was no dissent. They all knew it. There was something odd about the place. Nothing could be this peaceful.

The silence grew, became threatening, and the sound of the bees seemed more dominant.

'Bees?' Lacey wondered.

'They're not sodding bees,' said Sergeant-Major Owen Jenkin, who had once played rugby for Wales at Cardiff Arms Park.

And Neil knew with a feeling of foreboding that the sound he could hear was not the sound of a tractor cutting hay. It was heavier machinery than that.

They took their guns and began to move through the trees.

The fragrant smell became another kind of odour, difficult to identify. Strangely pervasive, it engulfed and seemed to assault them as they progressed to the far side of the orchard. Here the land was suddenly bare, stripped of vegetation as ruthlessly as a vast quarry, or an open-cut mine. At first glance it might have been an army camp. Or a makeshift factory complex, except that it was enclosed with jagged wire and overlooked by watchtowers. There were rows of wooden huts. And some people.

At least they looked like people. They neither turned to run away, nor came forward in welcome. Emaciated, vacantly staring, they seemed afflicted by a strange incomprehension, as if they were palsied or insane. Like figures in an alien landscape, without a reason to be there, showing no sign of emotion, no hope or expectation. Almost, Neil thought, no sign of real life.

As the troops drew closer, he and the others began to feel total disbelief Most people were clad only in rags, and some were naked. They had thin, rickety legs - flimsy and unstable. Those without shirts revealed arms so skeletal it seemed impossible they could support even their frail hands and fingers.

It was a place of filth and death.

Some lay on the ground, in their own excrement, without the strength to pluck off the lice that swarmed all over them. There was such an air of demented hopelessness and misery that the soldiers could not speak at first; it was a horror greater than any they could have imagined, at least until they saw the pits beyond - a series of huge craters - and in every one of these were piles of angular limbs, gaping mouths and the staring eyes of the dead. Not a few dead, or a few hundred, but thousands. Thirty thousand, it would be confirmed later, waiting to be concealed by earth, hidden and interred in the crude mass graves. And God alone knew how many thousands more had already long since been burnt or buried.

The grisly sight of these stacks of bodies, these naked skeletons with skin that had once been human beings, flung casually on top of each other in this grotesque display of death, was more terrible than anything they could have imagined. The humming sound, they now realised, came from the swarms of scavenging blowflies, while predatory birds swooped and tore at the carcasses for traces of rotting flesh. The stench, which was now inescapable, enveloped them like some noxious and repugnant poison.

Major Lacey vomited noisily.

The distant tractor had stopped, and Neil could now see it was not a tractor but a massive bulldozer, the blade pushing rubbish into yet another and even deeper crater. The rubbish was a pile of bones, shaven skulls and bloodless faces, some twitching as if they might be still alive. The driver of the machine looked across and saw them. He started to climb down, his hands held high in an urgent signal of surrender. Alongside Neil, Sergeant ­Major Jenkin whispered an obscenity in Gaelic. He raised his rifle and shot the driver. No-one made an attempt to stop him, or said a word of reproach.

The gaunt group of men and women, the ones who were not too feeble to stand, watched this and showed no emotion. They waited as if expecting their own deaths. A photographer who had been attached to the unit since they crossed the Rhine started to take pictures of the piles of dead, and then turned his camera on the survivors. They seemed to hardly notice or care.

'For God's sake,' a soldier said, 'do you have to do that?'

'Who's going to believe any of this if I don't?' the photo­grapher replied.

'Neil?' Jenkin beckoned him aside. 'Can you find out who the hell they are?'

It was one of the few skills the army had taught him, apart from an ability to kill the enemy, but he was unsure whether he could handle this. 'Major Lacey speaks better German than me.'

'Lacey's still spewing his guts out. Though I can't say I blame him. Have you ever, in your bloody life, seen anything like this?'

'Never,' Neil said. 'And I hope to Christ I never will again, until the day I die.'

He walked towards the group, who seemed to shrink from him. He gestured placatingly with his hands, like someone attempting to calm scared animals.

'Who are you?' Neil asked them, in his basic German.

'If they had anything to do with what happened, then shoot the fuckers,' said Richie Harris, one of the transport drivers.

'For God's sake, shut up,' Neil said angrily. He turned again to the listless group, and repeated the question. 'Who are you? What are you doing here?'

They seemed incapable of speech.

'Are you prisoners?'

'Yes,' one of the men answered.

'We helped,' another muttered, as if he was ashamed. 'They gave us enough food to keep us alive, so we could bury the bodies. But there were too many dead, so they stopped the food.'

'How long since you had anything to eat?'

'I think . . . four days.'

'Five days,' a painfully thin woman corrected him.

'And water?' Neil asked her.

'No water. The guards turned off the only tap many days ago.'

'Why?'

'To make us die quicker,' she replied.

'And these guards? Have they gone?' he asked her.

'No.' She pointed to several brick barracks in the distance.

Neil told this to Jenkin, who dispatched a squad with Tommy guns to surround the barracks. His orders were explicit; kill anyone who attempted to leave. He told others to bring their water bottles, and make sure the inmates all got enough to drink, but not too much at first. Jenkin was nominally in charge, as their Major was traumatised and incapable. He shouted for a signaller to get the news through to battalion headquarters, and urgently contact the Red Cross. They needed a water cart, food, medicines, disinfectant to kill lice, and they desperately needed nurses and doctors, because in the Welsh Sergeant-Major's opinion there was typhus here, and perhaps typhoid fever, too.

'What else can we do?' he asked Neil.

'Food and water. Nothing else till the medics get here. Treat them gently. Help them lie down in the shade. These poor bastards are walking corpses. Some aren't going to last much longer.'

Neil gave his own water bottle to the woman.

'How did you manage?' he asked.

'Our own urine,' she said, 'until yesterday.'

He realised she was probably in her fifties, although so gaunt it was impossible to tell. Her head had been shaved, but tufts of it were beginning to grow again. The tufts were stark white. The skin of her neck and all down her arms were covered with suppurating ulcers.

'Just a mouthful,' he said. 'There'll be more later.'

She sipped and held the water in her mouth, as if treasuring it, before she swallowed. Then she handed back the canteen and smiled.

For an astonishing moment, the smile almost made her beautiful.

'What's your name, Madame?' he asked her.

'Madame?' she answered. 'Thank you for calling me Madame. My name is Sarah Weismann. I have been called so many things these past years, but never Madame. Not for such a long time.'

'You must rest, Mrs Weismann,' Neil said.

'Yes,' she nodded. 'What's your name, English soldier?'

'Neil Latham.'

'Thank you, Neil Latham,' she said, quietly. 'It is good to know that kindness still exists in the world. Some humanity survives.'

'Not over there,' Neil said, indicating the brick buildings from which uniformed SS guards were emerging, surrendering to the squad with Tommy guns.

'No,' she said. 'Not there. Would it shock you to know the women guards were the worst? The most evil and vicious?'

'After today,' Neil told her, 'I don't think anything could ever shock me again.'

Ambulances were on their way. A doctor arrived and began to paint crosses on the foreheads of those he thought had any chance of survival, provided they were removed from the rancid and insanitary huts. He advised the soldiers to give them tiny amounts of food and sips of water. Their stomachs could not tolerate more. After starvation for so long, too much food could burst their fragile intestines, and too much water might choke or drown them.

As if in confirmation of his prediction, sixty died during the next hour, and others kept dying constantly throughout the day. It seemed to Neil some had only waited for rescue before giving up the struggle to live. But, extraordinarily, Mrs Weismann endured, and sat covered by a blanket the rescuers provided, watching what happened.

The guards showed no contrition. They were soldiers, they asserted, members of the elite Waffin-SS, responsible only to the Reichsfuhrer, obeying his orders. They had their papers of authority. The women camp guards, many of whom were unpaid volunteers, also said they were simply doing their duty. Their duty was the business of extermination in accordance with the wishes of their leaders. Jenkin instructed his men to hold their fire - no matter what their feelings - but if any of these bastards, male or female made an attempt to escape, they were to be shot. In the legs first, he said clearly, asking Neil to carefully and accurately interpret this, then a bullet in the guts so they would die slowly and very painfully.

Jenkin was consumed with a cold rage. He told Neil to make other announcements. First and most importantly, there was an urgent need to bury the bodies, because of the spreading threat of typhus. The SS were to complete the task they had forced the starving inmates to do; they would begin immediately to drag the rotting corpses to the mass graves. They were ordered to remove their death's-head badges, their medals, caps, tunics, and all emblems, and throw these into the pits with the dead. When they protested they were prisoners of war, and entitled to be treated as such, and that these people were just Jewish criminals, Jenkin took a Tommy gun and began to shoot in the earth around their feet. Spurts of dust encircled the alarmed guards. They backed away from the fusillade, bur found themselves surrounded by more allied troops. Minutes later, stripped of their insignias and all the trappings of power, they were carrying dead bodies to the pits. Other units and officers arrived, bur no-one made an attempt to countermand Sergeant-Major Jenkin's order.

All that day the commandant and his Waffen-SS force were made to haul the carcasses and human remains into the mass graves. Then floodlights arrived, and they were told to continue. When they protested, claiming they were hungry, the barest ration of food or drink was given to them. The local burgermeister and his town council were sent for, and told to observe what they had allowed to happen in their jurisdiction. They stood in an uncomfortable line, trying to pretend they had known nothing, and swore they had always believed this to be a prison farm. Later on, various district businessmen and dignitaries were drafted in to witness what had been done in their name.

'We're innocent,' they complained heatedly to Neil. 'If only we'd known this . . . ' He ignored them, waiting with Mrs Weismann, concerned for her and trying to persuade the doctors to remove her to hospital. But the few doctors available had no time to spend convincing one stubborn woman.

Some of the female guards were soon exhausted and sickened by what they were being made to do. They began to show distress. Many collapsed in tears, and those surviving prisoners strong enough to stand and witness this, cheered the sight. Others, stricken by a deeper anguish, could only gaze at this phenomenon with a quiet satisfaction.

At times it seemed to Neil there would never be sufficient pits or enough earth to cover the dead. The threat of typhus meant all the survivors must be washed and cleansed of lice, which terrified them, for cleansing was synonymous with gas jets and mock shower rooms where people were herded to die. Eventually the SS, stripped of all their arrogance and looking sick and haggard, were taken from the site in trucks to be imprisoned and face trial for war crimes and mass murder. By then, with most of Germany overrun by armies converging on Berlin, it was confirmed that this was no solitary camp, not some terrible aberration run by a sadistic commandant, but that throughout the Reich and its occupied territories there were more than three hundred such extermination centres.

During all this time, Sarah Weismann refused to leave. 'Please,' he begged her.

'When it's over,' she said.

When it was over, the thousands of unnamed dead covered by earth, they began to burn the camp. While they did, Sarah Weismann asked him to accompany her. They went to one of the huts, as the arson squad spread fuel and prepared to direct flamethrowers onto the gasoline.

'Get her out of here,' they warned.

'Ask them to give me one minute,' she said to Neil, and went inside the wooden prison barracks. It stank of filth and disease.

On either side were narrow tiers of wooden shelving, like planks. There were frayed and ragged scraps that had once been blankets, chewed by rats and crawling with insects and lice. They stopped by one of the cramped shelves, and she pointed to a space above their eye level.

'I slept up there,' she said. 'It was always difficult to climb up and down, and in the last weeks we didn't bother. We lived in our own dirt. There was no room to turn over without the risk of falling, and in winter the cold and damp made it impossible to sleep.'

'Dear God.' He shook his head, unable to comprehend it, and she took his hand. Her fingers, no heavier than a child's, clung to him.

'They didn't just want to kill us, you see. They wanted to destroy every Jew's faith in themselves. Our belief in ourselves as human beings. When you're whipped, made to run naked or raped at the whim of some creature; when you're deprived of food until you ache with hunger; when men and women are made to squat and perform their functions in front of each other like beasts, you slowly lose all the will to live. All you want is a speedy and painless death.'

'You didn't,' Neil said, feeling the awful sense of desolation she must have suffered here.

'I wanted to die just as much as the others,' Mrs Weismann said, 'but someone had to stay alive, if only to remember her.'

'Remember who?'

She beckoned him. At the end of the hut, beneath the lowest shelf was a bundle of rags. Before he knelt to remove them, the smell of death warned him. The body must have been lying there for over a week, but it looked preserved, almost human. There was the usual yellow waxen pallor of starvation. The woman - for it was a woman, he thought -looked wizened and aged.

'Who was she?' he asked. 'Friend?'

'No. Family.'

Her mother, he thought, but had no time to say so.

'My daughter,' she said. 'She was seventeen years old.'

He remembered trying to answer, and being unable to speak.

She had taken his hand again, more gently this time. She was dignified, somehow retaining her composure, eyes pleading with him to leave the prison hut and let them burn it, allow her child to be cleanly cremated instead of flung like a helpless figurine into a mass grave full of strangers.

He woke with sweat soaking him, weeping as he saw the flames engulf the wooden prison hut, hearing a voice trying to calm him.

'For God's sake, Neil, what is it? Are you all right?'

He felt the warmth of soft breasts, arms right around him, as she tried to comfort him. He realised it was Caroline, and they were in bed together for the first time; each supposedly visiting friends in London, but in fact spending the weekend in the picturesque old port of Rye, in a room of the Mermaid Inn. He hastily mopped his eyes as she leaned out to switch on the bedside lamp. It was still night, and nothing moved outside their window on the cobbled streets.

'You were in a state. Shouting something about a fire. What happened?'

'A bad dream,' he said. She was a nice girl; they worked in the local bank together, and found each other attractive - which was why they were here - but this was not something he could talk about. 'A nightmare,' he added, 'something that happened in the war.'

'The war's been over for two years,' she said.

Not this, Neil thought. This will never be over. He felt the chill of the sweat that drenched his body, and saw the flames consume the hut, and with it the wasted old woman who was Sarah's daughter.