She gulped, then fell silent. In the darkness I could see she was pressing her hands over her eyes. Joe leaned towards her, apparently trying to console her, but she pushed him aside. In the gloom I saw her move away from the van, stepping into the darker area beneath the nearest trees. I could hear her crying.
My heart impelled me to run across to her, hold her, comfort her, but in the last few minutes I had started to realize how little I really knew about her or her life. For that matter, too, how little I understood about what the Nazis had been doing to the Jews in Germany.
Here again, the time I am describing seems an age ago. Postwar hindsight threatens the accuracy of my memories, in particular the reliability of my remembered sensibilities. This was 1936. The concentration camps and the extermination camps, Himmler’s Einsatzgruppen, the vile medical experiments on prisoners, the forced labour and starvation, the gas chambers, all these lay years ahead. To say that Joe and I could not have known about the growing persecution would be facile, but even had we been blessed or cursed with foresight, who could have believed how it would in reality grow?
Yet the clues were in place. They were nakedly exposed in the speeches of Adolf Hitler, there for anyone to understand them, if they took the trouble. Rudolf Hess was no better, but he was not so well known at that time outside Germany. Although it was Hitler who announced the Nuremberg Laws, the series of measures that removed all civil, legal and humanitarian rights from the Jews, and which Birgit was in effect beginning to tell us about, it was Hess who had enacted them and it was Hess’s signature on the orders.
Again, Joe and I were two naive young men from a relatively sheltered background, whose principal interest was sport. Perhaps I was more naive than Joe, but it was true of us both. We were not untypical. Even those who should have known better, the politicians and diplomats of the Western democracies, clearly did not realize the enormity of what was happening in Germany. Perhaps they suspected more than they admitted, but they have claimed since that they did not. There was some mitigation: nothing like it had ever happened before, or not on such a scale, so it was easier to try to believe something else, to hope for the best. But those few minutes, in the hush of the silent forest, turned out to be the beginning of an education for me.
I sat down on the carpet of pine needles, away from the other two, thinking that my presence was only adding to the confusion. I certainly realized that the turbulence of my feelings and wishes meant that I was likely to say or do something I would quickly regret. I watched the indistinct dark shapes of the other two, visible against the white-painted background of the van. Birgit was sobbing quietly; Joe was talking to her. Either I could not hear what they were saying, or I closed my mind to it. Gradually she calmed.
A little later I went to the rear compartment of the van and found the Primus picnic-stove that Joe and I had brought with us from England. I set it up with some difficulty and managed to light the burner and heat up water from our canteen. I made coffee for all three of us, dark and strong, the way we knew the Germans liked it. Birgit sat on the van’s floor, between the open doors, cradling her cup and sipping the hot drink. Joe and I stood before her.
Joe told me what he and Birgit were planning. We spoke in English.
‘Birgit has no money with her, no passport, no documents of any kind,’ he said. ‘Just about everything has been taken away from the Jews in Germany. She is forbidden to travel and if she is discovered with us we will be in the most serious trouble. But we think we can get out of Germany OK. Her parents found out that there’s a Swedish ship sailing for England tomorrow, leaving from Hamburg. If we drive tonight and tomorrow we can catch it.’
‘What if we miss it?’
‘That’s when things might become more difficult. Doktor Sattmann thought that if we miss the ship we should attempt to drive across the border to Denmark and try our luck there, but it might be impossible.’
Joe, what in God’s name are we getting involved in here?’
‘We have to take Birgit to England. She’s not safe in Berlin anymore.’
‘What about her parents?’
‘They’re in the same position as Birgit. of course. They’ve decided they must escape from Germany too. They’ve been warned by friends in Berlin that if they travelled as a family they would probably be stopped at the border, so Birgit has to leave with us. As soon as they know she’s safe in England, they’re going to try to travel separately to Switzerland, where her father has a little money. With luck they’ll be able to get to France from there, then make it across to England. They might even leave next week. No one’s sure what’s going to happen to the Jews after the weekend, when the Games finish.’
‘Wouldn’t Birgit be safer staying with her parents?’
‘No. They’ve heard stories about other German Jewish families caught trying to escape.’
We were already committed to a desperate plan, with no safeguards except the most elementary ones. Joe and I agreed that Birgit could travel in the front of the van for as long as it was dark and we were not trying to cross any borders. As soon as we got near Hamburg, though, she would have to return to her hiding place and stay in it until we were on the ship and clear of German territorial waters.
Time was passing. We knew that we should cover as much distance as possible in the darkness of the short summer’s night. I offered to take the first turn in the cramped rear compartment of the van, settling myself on the mattress to make myself as comfortable as I could, with the board Joe had used as a cover stacked out of my way on the other side. It was hardly cosy, but after while I was able to doze a little.
After midnight Joe found another place in a side road to make a brief halt, and he and I changed places. I was stiff from being confined in the noisy, shaking rear of the van and was glad of the break. Birgit, sitting to my left, hunched down in the passenger seat with her knees drawn up against her chest. I said nothing as I turned the vehicle around and headed back towards the autobahn. The engine felt rougher, noisier than before. Every shift of the gears made the van jerk and shudder.
Once on the wide, modern road I was able to drive at a steady cruising speed, with few of those disruptive changes of gear. I hoped that Joe, silent in the compartment behind my seat, was finding it possible to sleep. I wanted to talk to Birgit, to make the most of our temporary companionship, but I already knew that for all the noise and vibration in the vehicle it was possible for someone in the back to hear what the two in the front were saying.
Whenever another vehicle went past in the other direction, I used the momentary glare of its headlights to steal a glance across at Birgit.
She remained awake, staring forward into the night. She gave no hint of what she was thinking. Eventually she did shift position, twisting her body and switching her legs so that they were on the other side. This put her head and shoulders closer to mine. When the next vehicle roared past on the other side of the autobahn, I glanced towards her and found that she was looking at me. Still neither of us said anything. Quite apart from Joe’s silent presence, asleep or awake, a few inches away, Birgit had the power to strike me dumb, to make me feel clumsy, to inspire me to think and say the most foolish and impetuous things. I sensed that it was a crucial night in my life, one that I should not ruin with hasty words, so I kept my silence. My senses reached out towards her. I was aware of every tiny movement she made, every small sound. I imagined I could feel the warmth of her face radiating across the short space between us so that my own cheek felt the glow of her. I craved to hear a first word from her that I could respond to, even a grunt or some other kind of semi-voluntary noise, a reaction to something which I could in turn react to. She remained silent. I drove on, completely obsessed with her, driven mad by her silent presence, but beginning to enjoy what we were doing. In the monotony of the almost deserted highway I could pretend to myself that Birgit and I were alone in the van, that Joe was no longer with us, that she and I were eloping together, driving through the warm European night to some romantic destiny.