commotion about them. The Germans had always beaten up Jews; in Vienna anti-Semitism was a fact of political life. It came and went, loud and soft, and in between people got on with their lives. Adolf Hitler was an Austrian, that’s all you needed to know. It was second nature to him to use anti-Semitism to get to power, but now that the reality of government had dawned, things would calm down; people would have to get on with their lives. It would be business as usual. It always was. As for the Jews who made too much fuss about all that, they didn’t help anybody — socialists, communists, liberals, Zionists, they should shut up. Now it was all very loud; soon it would be quieter again. If you shut up it always was.
The next day, on the train from Vienna to Warsaw, she sat in the dining car some of the way with an elderly couple from Czechoslovakia, though as Germans born in the Sudetenland they didn’t consider their country to be a country at all; they belonged in Germany. They didn’t like politics; politics was what was wrong with Europe. They certainly didn’t like everything Adolf Hitler did. He was too vulgar by half. He had saved Germany from socialism, that was undeniable, but the old man wasn’t sure he was good for business. They were delighted to discover Hannah was Irish. They had visited Ireland thirty years ago when the man had gone to England on business. As they talked about Dublin before Hannah was born it was like listening to her father and mother. They made her smile, a sweet couple, still very much in love in their seventies. At one point, the old man took his wife’s hand, telling the story of how they’d met, and he held it tenderly for half an hour. They were good company at first, and that part of the journey went quickly. Then in Katowice, in Poland, a Jewish man in the dark clothes of orthodoxy asked if he could borrow the old man’s Austrian newspaper. It was passed across with a polite smile, and the conversation about Ireland continued. The Jew returned the newspaper when he got off at Cze?stochowa. The old man shook his head sadly. The Jews had a lot to answer for. Politics was what was wrong with Europe and the Jews were the ones who controlled politics, the way they controlled everything. Hadn’t they started the war that destroyed Austria and brought Germany to its knees? Hadn’t they turned Russia into an atheistic wasteland? They were everywhere. You couldn’t move for them in Poland. She was lucky to live in Ireland, in a country without Jews. No, they didn’t like everything Adolf Hitler did, but he was right about the Jews. As they left the train at Warsaw, the old lady kissed Hannah and told her how much she reminded her of her daughter.
Two days after she had left Trieste, the train from Warsaw crossed the border into the Free City of Danzig. Hannah was almost at the end of her journey. There had been three months of silence from Ireland as far as Susan Field was concerned. She knew from her father that Brian Field had been to Pearse Street to see Inspector Donaldson several times. There were no developments. The police in Germany had been contacted about the whereabouts of Hugo Keller, with no results. As Keller was an Austrian citizen they assumed he must be in Austria. No one knew whether the police in Vienna had been contacted. None of it was surprising, and Hannah didn’t need to be there to hear what went unspoken. The choices Susan Field had made were not the choices any decent woman would even contemplate. She was an unsolved murder, but the Gardai weren’t looking for a solution, any more than they had looked for an explanation when she first disappeared.
At Christmas Hannah did believe Stefan Gillespie really would find out what had happened to her friend. Perhaps he would have done, despite the doors that were slammed in his face. But he had his own problems. She didn’t know everything, but she was aware that he had been close to losing his job. He had written once, early in January. She knew he was sitting on a hillside in West Wicklow, fighting to stop his son being taken away, because of what he thought or what he didn’t think, because of who he was, and who his parents and grandparents were. He was probably very new to that. She wasn’t. It came as easily and familiarly as breathing. Stefan had been in her mind a lot since she’d left Ireland. During those three months in Europe she had come close to contacting him several times. Sometimes she told herself it was only because Susan’s death was still there, still unresolved, but there were other reasons, and they had as much to do with what was unresolved in her own life as with her friend’s murder. However, she had made decisions about her life that she couldn’t change. It was too late now. She would be back in Palestine soon. She didn’t know when she would return to Europe or to Ireland. Perhaps she never would. But there was still the debt of love she owed her friend. It wasn’t enough that Susan’s death was forgotten. She knew where Francis Byrne was; Stefan Gillespie had told her that much. And if no one could find Hugo Keller, she would at least find the priest.
It was late when Hannah arrived in Danzig. The train had few passengers. When she had crossed the border, the flags were the flags of the Free City, a bright, cheerful red with a crown and two white crosses. The policeman who gave her passport a cursory glance wore the same insignia on his uniform. She had travelled on in the darkness, too tired to do anything other than stare at her reflection in the glass of the carriage, yet not tired enough to sleep. She had no expectations of the city. Danzig had its problems, she knew that, but it wasn’t Germany. Yet it was still a journey no one would want her to make. It would irritate Benny; it was all too personal. But in the end he would understand, at least he would do what he did when she annoyed him — say nothing. Sometimes a show of anger from him would have made her feel less patronised. But all that was for another day now.
When she stepped off the train at Danzig Hauptbahn, the flag of the Free City was nowhere to be seen. This wasn’t Germany; it was supposed to be another country, but every platform was draped with swastikas. And as she walked out to the station forecourt, the men standing around the Imbiss stall, eating bratwurst and drinking beer, wore the brown uniform of the Nazi SA. They were the first stormtroopers she had seen outside a newsreel.
The dining room of the Hotel Danziger Hof was noisy with breakfast. It had been almost empty when Hannah Rosen entered, but almost immediately it started to fill up. There was a crowd at the door now, waiting for tables. She sat by a window, looking out at the Hohe Tor, the High Gate, a great blockhouse of bricks pierced by an arch, once the main gate through the city’s encircling fortifications. The walls had been demolished to make room for the modern city, though as modern cities went Danzig wore its antiquity with pride. Once it had been an independent city-state, and it had maintained that independent spirit through the centuries of war that sucked it in and out of the kingdoms of Poland and Prussia. A hundred and fifty years ago the city had fought to remain part of a Poland that guaranteed both its autonomy and its Germanness, in the face of a Prussian juggernaut that had no use for any kind of Germanness other than its own. But that was long forgotten. Beyond the window of the Danziger Hof, in front of the Hohe Tor, was the statue of a man on a horse, wearing a spiked helmet; Kaiser Wilhelm, the first emperor of the unified Germany that had incorporated Danzig into its territory for barely fifty years before the First World War, finally sweeping away its cantankerous independence in a great tide of all-embracing Germanness. Now the Free City of Danzig stood on its own again, a tiny statelet, barely the size of Wicklow, locked in by Poland in the west and south and by German East Prussia to the east. The Free City was the creation of a fledgling League of Nations whose high democratic ideals sat uneasily with the city’s new purpose: to punish Germany for a world war and to pacify Poland. At the heart of the Free City, the League’s High Commissioner fought with the only weapons available to him, little more than good-humour and patience, to defend a democracy almost everyone in the city- state seemed to despise. The last thing German Danzig wanted was to be free again. It was typical of the city’s bloody-mindedness that having regained its ancient independence, most of its inhabitants dreamt only of disappearing back into the all-consuming sea of Germany once more.
‘The Free State of Danzig was involuntarily severed from Germany on January 10th, 1920 by the Treaty of Versailles.’ Hannah read from the guide book she had found in her room. She had brought it with her for the map, but she was grateful that it gave her something to do now. ‘In the face of all force the city has defended its German character through the ages; its very architecture speaks of German character, German art and German will.’ A tour of historical Danzig was the last thing on Hannah’s mind, but
The tables were almost entirely full of men, businessmen, salesmen, politicians, journalists. In a few days Danzig would vote for a new parliament. The expectation was that the ruling Nazi Party would win, very comfortably, the overall majority it needed to change the constitution, dispose of the opposition, kick out the League’s High Commissioner, and make this the last election the city would ever see. The road to reunification with Germany would follow; Hitler had already set a pattern for the abolition of democracy by democratic means. Danzig would be next.
Dotted everywhere among the dark business suits, contributing loud, excitable, argumentative voices to the buzz of conversation, were the uniforms of Nazism, of the Danzig Party and visiting SA and SS dignitaries from Germany. Hannah hadn’t expected to be thrown so completely into this world. The Nazis had power in Danzig, but
