Each time I saw Pechersky, I saw Samuel. He walked a step behind Pechersky, always close to him. He looked for me and I looked for him. I had been long enough in the camp to have had burned from my soul any trace of emotion. I have to say it — each time I saw Samuel I felt as if sunshine fell on me. It was as if, for the first time, I nurtured a trifling hope for the future. I hardly dared to think of such a distant goal, but it had captured me.
A new rumour, like an infecting virus, ran in the camp on the fourth day after Pechersky’s arrival. It was said that on 15 October the Germans would have completed their work at the camp. We would not survive that. Before, the rumours had been vague as to the timing. Now a date was talked of. Two moods gripped us. Pechersky had created a changed atmosphere, almost one of resistance. And there was despair with the talk that we would all be forced at bayonet point down the Himmelstrasse, thrown naked into the chambers and be there, body against body, when Gasmeister Bauer started the engine.
The capos were quiet that night. They patrolled with their whips but did not use them, and did not shout.
It was the night, also, that Pechersky came to the women’s barracks and met Feldhendler. I did not, of course, know it then but it was in our barracks hut, used for better security, that Feldhendler offered Pechersky total authority over any escape attempt he might consider. They were at the far end of our hut, huddled together, and spoke softly so they could not be overheard. Samuel had come with Pechersky, and we talked a little at the window. He held my hand — he had fingers as thin as those of a musician — and he told me he came from the city of Perm and had been captured when on a reconnaissance patrol west of the Moscow suburbs. I told him I was from Wlodawa, that my father had repaired clocks and wristwatches, and that all of my family were dead.
I asked him, ‘Is it possible to hope?’
He answered, ‘You have to believe in Sasha Pechersky. If anything is possible it will be because of Sasha Pechersky. It is what he carries on his shoulders, the hopes of us all.’
‘What can he do?’
‘I don’t know.’
Hope has a small, frail flame. To make it burn, I gave it trust. I offered trust to the young man who held my hand beside the window. Then I felt weaker and cursed myself. We looked out of the window at the tops of the trees nearest to the wire. They seemed beyond reach, and between them and us there were fences and guard towers, water-filled ditches and a minefield. I remember I heard the owls call from the forest.
He edged closer to them. Tadeuz Komiski had long had the skill, practised over many years, of moving silently among the trees.
They planted pine trees.
His feet, in old boots, stepped on the mat of decayed leaves and fallen needles that had dropped from the canopy. The light was failing, the rain pattered around him, but he did not put his weight on any dead branches.
They brought pine trees that were already a metre high on three wheelbarrows. Some dug the holes, some lifted the pines and placed them with their rooting compost in the holes. Some stamped down the compost around the slender trunks and others watered the base of the trees with a rubber pipe that led to an oil drum. Some hoed the ground where the next holes would be dug. They were, Tadeuz Komiski thought, like a labour detail, but they had no guards and there were no guns, no whips … He could remember when there had been guards, SS Germans and the Ukrainians — not well but with a halting clarity, but then he had been a child.
Men and women were planting the trees and clearing the path, some his age but most were younger. They worked hard with enthusiasm, which was different from when there had been a labour detail in the forest. They had strong, cheerful voices, but there was no laughter. He went closer. They stopped, broke off from the work. Komiski, behind a tree, saw flasks opened — they ignored the rain falling on them — and sandwiches taken out of plastic boxes.
He had not eaten properly for three days at least. The scent of their food and their coffee wafted to him, and his feet moved silently forward but there were always tree trunks between him and them.
A voice hit him from behind.
‘Hello, friend. Don’t watch us eat — we’ll share with you.’
He understood German, enough of it. He recoiled, felt trapped. He was between the big group and one man, and froze, but he yearned for food. He turned. The man was young, clean-shaven, and his features blazed warmth. He was zipping up his flies and then he fastened his belt. He held toilet paper and a short-handled spade was propped against his leg.
Komiski could not speak.
‘Did I frighten you? I apologize sincerely. Come, join us — I’m Gustav.’
His arm was taken. They had taught him German at school but it was a full sixty-five years since he had heard it spoken in the forest. He was led to the group. The young man, Gustav, spoke fast to his colleagues, and a sandwich was offered him with a plastic beaker of coffee. Tadeuz Komiski wolfed it and gulped the coffee, spilling some from the side of his mouth. He thought the members of the group too polite to laugh at him, and bent to pick up a crust he had dropped. Another sandwich was given him.
He was told, ‘We’re from Kassel. We’re an anti-fascist group. Only two of us are of Jewish origin, but ethnicity isn’t important to us. We’re making a memorial of the Road to Heaven. Those of us who are Jewish had relatives who died in the camp, but the rest of us are here because this is decent work. The Road to Heaven was the path used by the SS to drive victims of the extermination programme from the rail platform to the chambers where they were asphyxiated. We’re lining the route with good pine trees we bought from the forestry authority. We won’t finish this year, probably next.’
An apple was given him and the beaker was filled again. The coffee scalded his mouth. He held tight to the apple.
‘And we’ll put stones under the trees on which will be carved the names of some who went this route to die. We believe that the trees we put here and the stones will last for many years. Then this place and what was done here won’t be forgotten. We consider it would be a crime if the memory of the camp’s evil was lost.’
He took a bite from the apple.
‘I think, friend, you’re quite old. Excuse me, because I don’t wish to intrude, but you would have been a boy when the camp existed. I wonder, were you here when there was the break-out? Did you live in the forest with your parents? Do you remember when the camp revolted?’
Hands held out more sandwiches wrapped in cellophane, and a slice of fruit cake. His stomach growled. Tadeuz Komiski heard the sirens, rifle shots, and the rattle of machine-guns, which was clearest because they had been fired from the elevated watchtowers.
‘Do you remember … remember … remember? Were you here … here … here?’
Remember? It was never out of his mind. Tadeuz Komiski was always in this place, among these trees. He dropped the beaker and the remnants of the coffee slopped on his trouser leg. He threw away the half-eaten apple, turned his back on the sandwiches and cake, and ran.
‘Well, I suppose the best that can be said of it is that bloody Lawson didn’t show up. Anyway, here’s what’s come through.’
In a basement of the embassy building, Deadeye was passed two packages by the station chief. Big and bulky, wrapped in the thick brown paper used to send heavy parcels through the post for kids’ birthdays. But the packages weren’t presents, the courts had ordered that Deadeye had no contact with the children of his three failed marriages, and they hadn’t come through the post but by diplomatic courier.