He traipsed off down the corridor to the solace of the shower and war drums sounded in his ears.
The light came slowly under heavy cloud, and he waited.
The man did not go to the Florenc coach station for long-distance travel, or the principal rail terminus, the Mazarykovo Nadrazi, where the international trains left from. He was at a stop for a local bus that would take him only as far as the edge of Prague. His intention was to move away from the city in short, stuttered steps, not to use the coach station or any of the rail termini that he assumed would be watched.
He had slept rough in the Mala Strana parkland, had not dared since his flight to find a bed in a hostel.
Most of each day he had sat in the shadowed pews of St Thomas Church or St Nicholas Church or the Church of Our Lady Below the Chain, but for part of each of those days he had tramped the streets to learn.
The flight had taken him up through the hatch above the apartment's kitchen, and for a moment there he had reached down and grasped the hand of Iyad, their fists locking together. He had seen into the eyes of the bodyguard and had known that time would be bought for him – an hour, half a day, a day and a night. He would not waste the time. He had crawled, slowly, over the common wall between the buildings, scraping himself into the small space between masonry and roof tiles, and gone at snail's pace over the rafters and had heard TVs, radios and voices below him… and over another building's wall, and across more rafters.
The last had been the hardest. There he had had to scratch out the mortar, centuries old, that held the wall's stones, remove them silently, pray to his God that he did not make a disturbance. He had lifted a hatch, had found himself above a staircase, had dropped down, replaced the hatch, gone down the steps and out into the night air. A policeman had shouted at him: language not understood, gestures clear. The alley was evacuated. Residents should be gone. Why was he so late? His God had walked with him. A woman came behind him and held a pet, a lapdog, in her arms, and the policeman was distracted. The man thought she had slipped back in to retrieve her dog. He had drifted into the darkness.
An artisan, with his work bag on his shoulder, and his head protected against the rain by a cap, broke open a chocolate bar, ate two squares and gave one to the man. They smiled at each other. They were the only two persons waiting for the first suburban bus.
He had gone to the cafe near the coach station. He had seen the vans parked, had stood among the watching crowd and heard the smashing destruction of the search. He had seen the cafe owner led away, cowed and handcuffed. The crowds stayed to witness the show, but the man had sidled away. He had been alone in a strange city with only a tourist street map, a passport and the name of the contact he must reach.
He had thought the vigilance, once the apartment had been stormed and once Iyad's defence was ended, would be greatest in the first hours. He did not know if they had his face or the identity of the passport against his chest.
The chocolate made his stomach growl with hunger, but the bus came in the early thin light and the man travelled on through empty streets, past concrete tower blocks and by old factories, resumed his journey to the north and the coast.
When the torments came worst, when he could not sleep, Oskar Netzer would give up the fight. He sat on the sandbank, the first beat of the low sun on his back, and watched the strand across the channel between Baltrum and the greater island of Norderney.
For the dawning of those days when he was persecuted by memories, he dressed in the gloom of his house, kicked his feet into his boots, and searched for salvation. The torments that afflicted him had killed her, his Gertrud, as surely as if he had bent over her while she slept and smothered her with a pillow.
She was dead, buried in the cemetery at Ostdorf, because of him, as if by his hand.
The water in the channel rippled and dazzled and sunbeams danced on the waves. On the strand beyond, uncovered and wide because the tide was out, lay an old wreck whose hull was rusty dark and had sunk into the windblown sand. Near it were the seals, bulls and cows, who had not yet produced pups. After his love of the eider ducks, Oskar revered most the seals, Phoca vitulina, great gentle creatures.
The island still slept and the visitors had not yet come, and watching the seals at dawn gave him slight respite from the agonies of the past. The words written on the sheet of paper by his uncle, Rolf, stayed with him, as clear as they had been on the day he had heard them read in the lawyer's office – and the pain he had run from, had not escaped.
The Deposition of Rolf Hegner – the story of my guilt for which I expect to burn in hell. Those who have given me undeserved love should know the truth of me.
In 1941 joined the Schutzstaffel. Because of the problem of fallen arches in my feet I was not sent to a combat unit, but was posted to the concentration camp at Neuengamme. I worked there as a driver. I took prisoners, many of them foreign resistance fighters from France, Holland and Scandinavia, to work on building projects outside the camp and to dig from the clay pits for the lining of canals. After the firestorm raids of the British and Americans on Hamburg, I drove prisoners to the city for clearance and for the excavation of the mass graves for citizens at Ohlsdorf cemetery.
At Neuengamme, medical experiments were carried out on Russian prisoners and on Jewish children who were inoculated with live tubercle bacilli.
On 20 April 1945, when the British military forces were near to Neuengamme, I received orders to prepare two lorries to drive to Hamburg.
That day was the Fuhrer's birthday. Late at night, the twenty children, with two Dutch persons who cared for them and two French doctors who knew of the experiments and twenty-four Russians, were brought out of their quarters and loaded on the lorries. Pedersen drove the lorry with the children, Dreimann brought the ropes, Speck guarded the children. I drove the lorry that transported the Russians. We went in convoy, with high camp officials in cars, to the school at Bullenhuser Damm in the Rothenburgsort district. The Jewish children were taken inside, then down into the cellars where there was a hook embedded in the ceiling.
While the Russians, the Dutch and the French doctors were kept in the yard, the children were hanged one at a time in the cellar after being given injections of morphine while they waited their turn in an outer corridor. Trzebinski, the camp medical chief, supervised the executions. The noose was put round the children's necks by Frahm who then pulled on their legs.
After all the children were dead, their bodies were brought back to the lorries, but the Russians, Dutch and French were taken inside and hanged or shot. Before morning, all the bodies had been cremated at Neuengamme.
We were the only witnesses who lived.
After they had made investigations, the British authorities tried Trzebinski, and Thurman who had commanded the prisoner compound and
Pauly who had been commandant at
Neuengamme. They were executed by hanging at Hameln. Many others, myself among them, were not prosecuted but were left free to follow our lives in the aftermath of war.
I see the children today, as I write, I see them every day – I see them every night.
We did not stay to clear up the school's cellar.
Where the children had been until they were called forward, we left behind clothes, shoes, toys. A little carved wood car was on the floor.