Charnal lights covered that spring. Scraps of newsprint transmitted Heinrich Himmler’s elegy to the SS: ‘And what will history say of us? Petty minds bent on revenge will bequeath a false perverted version of things great and good, the deeds I have done for Germany.’
Once a tourist village encircled by thick woods, Meinnenberg possessed a summer camp of chalets, cafés, jazzy pavilions, a pool now dense with slime. A few picnic tables still supported faded, rainbow-tinted umbrellas, incongruously cheerful amid an amalgam of hostel, lazar-house, hide-out, camp, established and supervised, perforce irregularly, by the Swedish Red Cross, occasionally by the SS.
The woods had been crushed to fill makeshift stoves, shelters, latrines, anything to assist and protect the constant intake of German peasants and deserters, enigmatic Balts, Mongoloid Russian renegades turned bandit, tramps with faces locked into fear and suspicion, gypsies, townsfolk once neatly respectable, now twitching idiotically from air-raids, several Lutherans and Lithuanian Catholics. Another New Order, New Europe. Many of us would have been disposed of as Untermenschen by a Reich that had overtaken the Germania of scholars, songsters, princes. I had very quickly learnt of the SS Night and Fog directive, obeying the Führer’s command to eliminate life unworthy of Life.
One man, scarred, interminably coughing, had crept from von Paulus’s army, joined Russian commandos, deserted them. ‘At Stalingrad, early on, we saw a wide, grey mist on the earth, streaming towards us. Rats!’
The sky had narrowed, lost all luminosity. Day and night merged in common crisis. Outside the stockade I had already trodden on stiffened, rancid, sodden flesh and been surprised at my indifference: tallowy face, eyes sunk in blood and dust. No more. Life was less valued than a packing case, delivery of lard, theft of bacon or string. Amongst the sick and hopeless, some women, haggard, heads gleaming, shaven for hygiene, viciously sought red fungus and old book covers to tint their parched faces. In its way, Resistance.
On my second day, unremarked, neither welcome nor unwelcome, I saw another head, thick with a dim glitter which suddenly stirred, quivering with lice.
I could relate only to myself. The Manor was irretrievable, my parents only vapour and bones. I was attuned not to tennis and books but to deaths, the threats from others’ ill temper, moroseness, hunger. At this time, in this abyss, I could have signed damning papers unread, found excuses for the inexcusable, like some devious Public Prosecutor, a Fouquier-Tinville. Only one certainty prevented absolute surrender to filth and savagery: that I was fatefully protected, like the youngest son to whom birds speak, wise old men nod and for whom the princess waits.
Little could be guessed from clothes and manners. Uniforms had been discarded in panic, almost all were ragged, some absurdly distinguished by a gaudy sash, feathered hat, belt, stolen in some raid or by clumsily hacked clogs, heavy but soundless in the clotted mud.
Germans mostly avoided each other, some suspected of SS credentials. Two Czechs boasted that with the collapse of a Polish gaol they had gladly massacred SS guards and Jewish kaputs. One child, almost naked, with scared, unblinking eyes, could only repeat, ‘I’m far away.’
Help from any outside administration being spasmodic, all at first appeared anarchic but eventually, as I scoured for food, committed small thefts of straw and biscuit, I recognized a skeleton authority of a few men and women, the Ten Per Cent Factor, always seeking to find former nurses, carpenters, bakers, cooks from those who arrived daily, replacing the dead.
Under putty sky, within derelict but crowded shacks, stench, hubbub, the half-throb of sterile vagabondage and want, greyness dominated. Pure colours surfaced only in recall of brilliant water, radiant trees, scented flowers. Green was lost in summers that had neglected this desolate outpost: lawn, billiard table, a green evening gown, were as if forbidden. Yellow was maggoty, blue deathly, crimson neither glowed nor swaggered but spilt from the dead and wounded.When, years ahead, Nadja said that Van Gogh identified thirty-seven shades of black in Hals’ art, I thought of Meinnenberg and the elimination of colours once serene.
For several days I wandered haphazardly through the camp and the broken village, scrounging, sleeping on straw, trusting none, my farmyard attire not concealing health and youth, both perilous here, like cleanliness, restraint, an educated voice. Securing place at a communal table, I could hear only braggarts, possible spies, scroungers like myself, together with the pleading, the impotent good-natured, the inert, while children, skinny from malnutrition, begged, played tag, pimped, fingered their loins invitingly. Too many were orphans, were shrewd, grasping, wary, eyes over-bright or almost extinct.
Older folk, first to vanish, prayed, in a whining sort of way, but expecting little.
The most obviously powerful figure was Vello, ogreish, Latvian, from whom I first thought I must seek protection, though was then deterred by his entourage, brutalized men and girls, better fed than most, wild-haired, ready to pounce.
To steady myself, I whispered, ‘Great Wrath. French Terror. Stalingrad.’
Meals somehow appeared, mostly from determined women. Barging for the tables, we gulped down messes of hare, squirrel, parsnip, hay-like bread, unidentifiable birds. Vello was the most acclaimed provider, a professional poacher, mottled by drink, face strung with broken veins and bald as a wrestler. With his pack, nicknamed the Acrobats, he raided farms and orchards, ambushed lorries for military stores, liquor, medical supplies, pillaged fields and barns for straw, tools, frost-bitten potatoes. Beholden to none, he was reputed to have stamped on a dying girl for a tin of tobacco. An accusation possibly unjust.
After my three requisite days in the Underworld, a voice addressed me. ‘Perhaps you will care to help in our labours.’
Gently, even tentatively, uttered in a formal German distinct from the rough dialects and polyglot rumbles, not demanding but enquiring, the speaker was in long, clean overalls and carrying a hoe. Almost alone, he had contrived to shave. A pale, ovalled face beneath hair light and thinning, ‘Hanoverian blue’ eyes, an indeterminate smile. Slender but not famished, neither young nor old but a singular mixture of each, and a veneer of improbable humour.
At my confusion, his smile was more candid. ‘People are good enough to call me Wilfrid.’
Yes, his German was excellent, his nationality more questionable. Possibly Hungarian, Slav, Jewish. Whether I had ever met a Jew was doubtful. I imagined Jews as wily, exotic, with powers not readily assessable.Whatever the truth, this individual could not be easily envisaged as shouting ‘Fatherland’ with strident fervour.
His consideration drew me out of the human debris of so much Meinnenberg. By professional expertise of fluke of personality he unofficially manipulated the group attempting rudimentary organization. He led in encouraging, soothing, mediating and, foremost of hazards, treating with Vello and establishing a precarious Mutual Assistance truce.
Vello and the Acrobats occupied an old barn, respectfully or jeeringly called Wolf’s Lair, after Hitler’s overrun Eastern HQ. From there they bargained with the main group, offering the hares, crows, the rare morphine tablet. Wilfrid’s reserved cordiality, residue of a vanished, probably cosmopolitan élite, must have bemused the primitive, superstitious Latvian, darkly cautious of anything outside his own simplicities. He was often unseen for many days, ‘on patrol’. He scowled at hygiene precautions, rations, restraint, yet reluctantly forced his thugs to, in some measure, concede to them. Before Wilfrid’s arrival he had ruled undisputed, denying food to babies and the sick. Behind his inarticulate brutishness might lurk deep grievance or hatred, which, should outside relief be delayed too long, might have violent ending. For the younger he induced not only fear but a Dantonesque audace, the chance of a break-out from privation and uncertainty, which the patience, industry, professional skills of Wilfrid’s cabal did not.