His pipe had gone out. He tapped the bowl reflectively against the palm of his hand.
“One day I was taken to the commandant’s office. They told me that if I would sign a paper renouncing my German citizenship, saying that I would leave Germany and would not return, I would be allowed to go. At first I thought it was merely another of their tricks for making you give yourself away. But it was no trick. Not even their precious People’s Court could find anything to convict me of. I signed the paper. I would have signed anything to get out. Then I had to wait for three days for my permit to arrive. During that time they kept me away from the other prisoners. Instead of working with them I was put on to cleaning latrines. But at night we went to the same dormitory. And then something curious happened.
“Talking between the prisoners was forbidden, and the rule was enforced so savagely that the eyes-on-the-ground idea applied as much between prisoner and prisoner as between prisoner and guard. If you looked at another prisoner they might say you had been thinking of talking. The result was that you recognized the man next to you not so much by his face as by his shoulders and the shape of his feet. I had a shock when, as we were being marched into the dormitory on my last night there, I saw that the man next to me was trying to catch my eye. He was a gray-faced, heavy sort of man of about forty. He’d only been there six months, and by the way they’d singled him out for floggings I had guessed that he was a Communist. There was a guard near us and I was frankly terrified of giving them an excuse to cancel my permit. I got into my bunk as quickly as I could and lay still.
“It used to be quite common for the prisoners to have nightmares. Sometimes they would just mumble, sometimes they would shout and scream in their sleep. As soon as a man started one of the guards would get a bucket of water and empty it over him. I never slept much there, but that night I didn’t sleep at all. I kept thinking of getting away the next day. I had been lying in the darkness for about two hours when this man next to me started to mumble in his sleep. One of the guards came over and looked at him, but the mumbling had ceased. When the guard moved away it started again, but now it was a little louder and I could hear what he was saying. He was asking if I were awake.
“I coughed a little, turned restlessly, and sighed so that he should know that I was. Then he began to mumble again, and I heard him telling me to go to an address in Prague. He only had time to say it once, for the guard had come over again and he was suspicious. The man turned over suddenly and began flinging his arms about wildly and shouting for help. The guard kicked him and, as the man pretended to wake up, threatened him with a bucket of water if he wasn’t quiet. I heard no more from him. The following day I was given my permit and put on a train for Belgium.
“I won’t attempt to tell you what it felt like to be free again. It worried me at first. I couldn’t get the smell of camp out of my nostrils and I used to go off to sleep at all sorts of odd times during the day and dream that I was back there. But I got over that after a bit and began to think like a human being again. I spent a month or two in Paris doing a little work for the newspapers there, but the language difficulty made it almost impossible. I had to pay to have my stuff properly translated. I decided finally to try Prague. At the time I had no intention of going to the address that had been given me. I had, indeed, almost forgotten about it. Then something I heard from another German I met in Prague made me decide to investigate. That address turned out to be the headquarters of the German Communist underground propaganda organization.”
He paused for a moment to relight his pipe. Then he went on.
“After a while, when they were sure of me, I started working for the underground. The principal activity was getting news into Germany, real news. We produced a newspaper-the name of it doesn’t matter-and it used to be smuggled in small quantities over the frontier. It was printed on a very thin India paper and each one folded into a thin wad that a man could carry in the palm of his hand. Many different methods were employed for the smuggling, some of them very ingenious. The copies were even packed in small greaseproof bags and stuffed inside the axle boxes of the Prague-Berlin trains. They were collected by a wheel-tester at the Berlin end, but the Gestapo caught him after a while, and we had to think of something else. Then it was suggested that one of us should make an effort to get a Czech passport, pose as a commercial traveler and take the papers in with samples. I volunteered for the job, and after some trouble we were successful.
“I crossed into Germany over thirty times that year. It wasn’t particularly risky. There were only two dangers. One was the chance of being recognized and denounced. The other was that the man who took the papers off me to pass them on to the distributing organization might become suspect. He did become suspect. They didn’t arrest him immediately, but watched. We used to meet in the waiting-room of a suburban station and then get into a train together. I would leave the parcel of papers on the luggage rack when I got out. He would pick it up. Then one day, just after the train had left the station, it stopped and a squad of S.S. men got in from the track. We didn’t know for certain whether it was us they were after or not, so we went into separate compartments and sat still. I heard them arrest him and waited for my turn. But they just examined my passport and went on through the train. It was not until I was nearly back in Prague the next day that I realized that I was being followed. Luckily I had the sense not to go back to headquarters. Luckily, that is, for my friends. It was less lucky for me. When they found that I wasn’t going to lead them to the persons they wanted they decided that the best way would be to get me back to Germany and use their persuasive resources to extract information. You see, our newspaper had begun to worry them, and I was the only real clue they had to the people behind it. The German end of the organization was concerned purely with distribution. It was the directing brains that they were after. I had to get away. And it had to be out of Czechoslovakia, too, for they had notified the Czech police that I was really a German criminal wanted for theft and that the Paul Czissar passport had been obtained under false pretenses.
“In Switzerland they tried to kidnap me. I was staying on the shore of Lake Constance and got friendly with two men who said they were on a fishing holiday. One day they asked me to go out with them. I was bored. I said that I would go. Just in time and quite by accident I found out that they were Germans, not Swiss, and that their boat had been hired on the German side of the lake. I went to Zurich after that; I knew they would keep track of me, but they couldn’t do any kidnapping so far away from the frontier. But I didn’t stay there long. One morning I got a letter from Prague warning me that the Gestapo had somehow found out that my name was Schimler. They had known before, of course, that Paul Czissar was no Czech, but a German; but now that they knew my real name they would not have to kidnap me to get me back to Germany. I’ve been on the run ever since. Twice they’ve nearly caught up with me. Switzerland was swarming with Gestapo agents. I decided to try France. The people in Prague sent me to Koche. He’s one of them.