Darkness ensued when Annaliese turned off the jeep’s headlights, but only for a second — the lorry driver was now waving a torch in their direction. ‘Women!’ he exclaimed, as if he couldn’t believe it.
Annaliese clicked on her own torch, and shone it straight back at him. In the cab the hands shot up again, but not quite fast enough. The face was familiar, Effi thought.
‘We’re nurses,’ Annaliese told the driver, in a tone that suggested it should have been obvious. Still shining the torch straight at him, she got out of the jeep. ‘Shall we point these at the ground?’
He followed her lead. ‘Doctors scared of the dark, are they?’ He was young, not much more than twenty.
‘Something like that. Where are the medicines?’
‘Where’s the money?’
Annaliese pulled the bag out from under her seat and set it down on the bonnet.
He started forward.
‘The medicines first,’ Annaliese insisted, laying a protective arm across the bag.
He hesitated for a moment, and Effi reached down a hand for the gun. The butt was cold to the touch, and she had the strange sense of time standing still. Could she shoot him?
She probably could.
She didn’t have to. He laughed, turned and walked to the rear of his lorry. They heard the door latch clank open, and a few moments later he was on his way back with two large cardboard boxes piled up in his arms.
‘Put them in the back,’ Annaliese told him, stepping back a few paces to keep a safe distance. Effi, still grasping the gun, kept one eye on the driver, one on the shadowy figure in the cab.
He placed them on one of the back seats.
‘How many are there?’ Annaliese asked.
‘Six. Another four.’
‘Does that sound right?’ Effi asked softly as he went for more.
‘More or less.’ Annaliese was opening the uppermost box with a fearsome-looking pocket knife, then shining her torch at the contents. ‘It looks all right,’ she muttered.
The driver returned with two more, and placed them on the other seat. ‘You don’t need to check them,’ he said indignantly, as if his integrity as a black marketeer had been called into question.
He collected the last two boxes, and wedged them between the others. He ran his torch up Annaliese, starting with the boots and ending with the blonde curls peeking out from under her hat. ‘Maybe next time we can combine business with pleasure.’
‘In your dreams,’ Annaliese told him contemptuously.
Effi’s grip tightened on the gun, but the man just laughed. ‘We’ll see,’ he said, sweeping up the bag and turning away.
Annaliese got in, handed Effi the torch, and turned the headlights back on. As Effi had expected, the man in the cab was ready, his face well covered. But would he lower his guard once the headlights had swung past? As Annaliese aimed the laden jeep through the gap between lorry and factory wall, Effi aimed the torch at the lorry’s cab and took her masking hand from the beam. She was treated to a close-up of a furious face, and a clear recollection of where she’d seen it before.
‘It was towards the end of 1943,’ she told Thomas. They were alone in the kitchen, the rest of the house having long gone to bed. The Russian bus would be picking her up in about five hours, but after all the evening’s excitement she felt far too restless to sleep. ‘I collected a Jewish boy from a house in Neukolln — Erik had told me the boy was fourteen, but if so he was big for his age. He was going to stay with us at Bismarckstrasse for a few days while Erik arranged his exit from Berlin. I was carrying the forged papers of an imaginary nephew in case we were stopped on the U-Bahn. I used those papers whenever I had a young man to move.
‘Anyway, the boy was nervous. More than nervous — he seemed almost hysterical, in a quiet sort of way. He’d been living in a room not much bigger than a cupboard for almost a year, and he’d lost all his family and friends, so I wasn’t surprised to find him in bad shape. But I didn’t realise how bad until it was too late.’
‘What was his name?’ Thomas asked.
‘Mannie,’ she said after a moment’s reflection. ‘I don’t think I was ever told the family name.’
‘Go on.’
‘On the walk to the U-Bahn station he kept looking round to see if anyone was following us, and I had to tell him he was making us both conspicuous. That seemed to calm him down, and once we reached the station he managed to sit and wait without drawing attention to himself. He insisted on sitting several seats away from me once we boarded the train, so I wouldn’t be implicated if anyone recognised him. He had this horror of running into one of his old non-Jewish schoolmates, and being denounced.
‘So we travelled a few seats apart, me reading a paper, him staring rigidly into space. And after we changed at Stadtmitte he kept the same distance on the second train, still looking like a frightened rabbit.
‘The Gestapo got on at Potsdamer Platz. Four of them, two through each end door. All in their stupid leather coats. I turned to give the boy a reassuring look — it was only a routine check, and our papers were as good as they got — but it was too late. He was already halfway through the doors.
‘And once he was out he had nowhere to go. He just jerked his head this way and that as the four of them closed in.’ Effi shook her own head in sympathy. ‘And then he just threw himself at one of them. Like I said, he was a big boy. The man went down with the boy half on top of him, and a gun skidded across the platform.
‘The boy looked at it. We could all see him — the train was still standing there with its doors open. He looked at the gun. He didn’t even reach out a hand, but you could see him thinking about it.
‘And then one of the Gestapo shot him. Not just once, but four times, and the boy just slumped down on his side. One of them knelt down beside him and went through his pockets, and I was sitting there thanking God that I’d kept his papers with my own. The other three just stood around making small-talk.
‘The one who did the shooting was smiling as he reloaded his gun. He was the man I saw tonight.’
Leon and Esther
Russell watched as the two open lorries were loaded, around twenty people to each. A dozen of them were children, and all but one had left Poland as orphans. All had since been adopted, temporarily at least, by one or more of the adults. Russell had spoken to most of the latter that day, sometimes alone, sometimes with Lidovsky acting as an interpreter. They had all impressed him with their singularity of purpose, some more than others with their outlook on the world. Their Palestine would not lack for solidarity, but it might have trouble loving its neighbour.
The quarter-moon lighting the scene was the reason for their early departure. It was due to set soon after midnight, and without it, as Lidovsky explained, the obligatory detour through the forest would be very dark.
It was five past nine when they set off, the two lorries rolling quietly down towards the River Gail, and drumming their way across the girders. There were sometimes British spot checks at the bridge, but thanks to a Jewish lieutenant at the local British HQ, they knew that none were arranged for that night.
The lorries started climbing, their engines noisy in the clear mountain air. Most of the passengers were standing, hands clutching the sides for balance as they stared out at the moonlit landscape. The phrase ‘shining eyes’ came to Russell, which sounded romantic but fitted the bill. A night this beautiful would cause most eyes to shine, and these people had a vision to live for. He thanked fate and Isendahl for letting him share their journey.
The lorries rumbled down the cobbled street of a small and almost lightless town, where a swaying drunk sidestepped the leading lorry with a matador’s aplomb, then sunk gracelessly back against the kerb. The road was now sharing the valley with a river and railway, the three of them intertwining their southerly course as the slopes above them steepened.