there was still a constitution that was meant to stop them abusing it — at least that’s what the English newspapers said. Yet walking the short distance from the station to Dominikswall and the Danziger Hof the night before it didn’t feel like that. The dark streets were lined with the red, white and black of the crooked cross. In Elisabethwall she stopped to ask for directions. When she turned to walk on she saw she was standing in front of a shop selling children’s clothes. The windows were broken. A Star of David was daubed on the door; and the words ‘Die Juden sind unser Ungluck’. The Jews are our misfortune.
She had slept very little that night. She had thought about Stefan. Now she wished he was with her. She told herself it was because he knew what to say, because he would know what was true and what wasn’t, but it was also because she felt he would make her stronger. She hadn’t considered Danzig being another Germany now. She should have done. She read the papers. Sometimes she could be too single-minded to think things through; her mother always said that. But when her mother said it there was usually something to laugh about. Now she was having breakfast in a room full of Nazis. She felt people were looking at her, and they were. There were other women in the dining room, but she was the only one on her own, fair game for businessmen and reps with nothing better to do. Normally it wouldn’t have bothered her, but now she was starting to feel she couldn’t breathe. A tall SS man was trying to catch her eye. He had been looking at her since he came in.
She got up abruptly, just as the waiter arrived with a basket of bread and pastries, beaming his regrets about how busy it was. He fussed over her, full of kind, concerned apologies, telling her the bread was still warm from the oven, but only drawing more attention to her with his paean to the pastries. She smiled awkwardly, mumbling something about being late, and left. As she passed the SS man caught her eye again; this time he winked.
Irritated by the sense of panic that had started to envelop her, she focused firmly on the concierge’s instructions. She walked quickly away from the hotel. Boys from the Hitler Youth were giving out election leaflets on the pavement. In Kohlenmarkt a column of teenage girls in brown dresses, two-by-two, moved across the square, singing a German folk song, so beautiful that she stopped and stared, almost forgetting where she was. The girl at the front carried a swastika pennant. Hannah could see a Number 2 tram, waiting. She ran to catch it. She felt more relaxed now, grateful for the rattling of the tram. Movement had become important to her in the last few months. A train, a boat, even a few moments on a tram. Everything was easier when she was moving. The tram ran along Stadtgraben, past the station. On the left, the green wooded hills of the Hagelsberg rose up above the city. She thought that in a different time she might have liked this place. Her grandfather had come from Lithuania; it wasn’t so far away across the Baltic. She tried to remember the stories he had told her; the journey that brought him out of Russia to Ireland, through Germany and Holland and England. Hadn’t the boat stopped here? She was sure it had. The journey started on a boat, she knew that. She looked down at the map. The tram was moving out of the city, through the Langfuhr suburbs to Oliva and Zoppot. A line of linden trees stretched ahead. She would see the Baltic Sea soon. But none of that mattered. What mattered was that she would see Father Francis Byrne.
All of a sudden the people sitting around her on the tram got up and moved to one side, crowding at the windows and looking out. She didn’t get up, but she looked. She had been too absorbed in her thoughts to notice the groups of people along the road, watching, waiting, holding swastikas. She could see flags waving now. People were cheering. The passengers on the tram started applauding as they gazed out through the windows. She could see a line of black cars coming the other way, heading into the city. There was an open Mercedes-Benz. A big man in an elaborately belted and bemedalled uniform sat in the back, smiling and waving at the crowds. She recognised Herman Goering from newspapers and newsreels, even in the seconds it took the car to pass. The hotel manager had told her as she checked in; he was flying from Berlin to speak at an election rally. The tram passengers were shouting. ‘Germany! Danzig back to Germany!’ In the Danziger Hof she felt panic; what she felt now was the cold sweat of fear.
She left the tram at Oliva and walked through the quiet park that led to the cathedral. Behind her was the Baltic Sea and the resort of Zoppot. Ahead the hills rose up again, thickly forested, dark even in the spring sunlight. The path led her through landscaped gardens and neat groves of trees. It was a place of carefully tended calm. There were no flags, no uniforms. The city seemed a long way away here. Two gardeners greeted her as she passed. Though the greeting was German they spoke in Polish as she walked past.
She asked for Father Byrne at the office opposite the cathedral. The secretary spoke some English and was keen to use it. Father Byrne was doing confessions in English now, but he would be finished any time. When the woman discovered Hannah was from Ireland she struggled to find the English words to tell her how pleased he would be to see her, then gave up and told her in German anyway. Hannah needed all the ignorance of German she could muster to curb the woman’s enthusiasm and persuade her not to come with her across the square to find the priest. She hurried out quickly.
She stood for a moment, looking up at the two red-brick towers, topped with copper spires, blue-green against a sky that was very clear now. The sun was warm in the sheltered square in front of the cathedral. She felt she wanted to stay a little longer in the light of this place she didn’t know, unsure what finally arriving meant. She steeled herself and walked on.
As she entered the cathedral she expected it to be dark. Instead it was full of light. There was colour everywhere. Stretching along either side of the narrow chancel were dozens of carved and painted altars. It was silent and empty and its beauty briefly stilled the noises in her head. There was a deep smell of old wood and centuries of incense. The only great churches she had been into were St Patrick’s in Dublin and Westminster Abbey in London. They were history lessons in stone. This was a softer place. She could feel the faith that made all its ornateness something simple and reassuring. The almost random confusion of colour and light was a perfection no one had ever set out to create, but there it was. It was everything a synagogue wasn’t. Judaism was a faith that rested in words. It had no truck with all this, decoration piled on decoration. Yet it wasn’t so different. She didn’t often think of the psalms she had heard sung every Saturday of her life as a child, but they spoke of the wild places of the spirit, and in that wilderness they imposed order and peace. These were the words, the same words somehow, in brick and stone. There was a calm here that almost seemed to drain away her purpose. But suddenly that intrusive calm was gone. She saw the priest.
He emerged from one of the wooden confessionals and unhooked a small sign from the door. ‘Father Byrne English Confessions.’ He walked through a line of pews and genuflected in front of the high altar, then moved towards the main door where she was standing. He smiled as he approached. ‘Guten morgen.’ ‘Good morning, Father,’ she answered. He caught her accent easily in those few words. And he was pleased to hear it. He wasn’t very tall. His hair was fair, almost blond. Hannah remembered Susan saying it made him look younger than he was, even though it had started to recede. It was a boy’s hair. She’d said his eyes were very bright. They didn’t look so bright to Hannah. Far from looking younger than he was, he looked older.
‘You’re a long way from home.’
‘Are you Father Byrne?’
There was an intensity in the way she was looking at him that made him very uncomfortable almost straight away. But he smiled pleasantly.
‘I am. Is it a holiday then?’
‘I came to see you.’ There was no lightness in her voice. He didn’t know what to make of her. It was as if there was an accusation in her eyes.
‘Well, I’m glad you did. I just wondered why you were in Danzig.’
‘I was a friend of Susan Field’s.’ She spoke the words softly.
He looked at her with an expression of almost pained bewilderment. It was as if he had to think hard to understand what she meant before he could answer. Hannah said nothing. She just waited. The next words had to be his.
‘I’m sorry.’ He seemed even older as he said the words.
It wasn’t much. She could see he knew it wasn’t enough.
‘I heard, of course. It’s a terrible loss.’
Hannah’s presence really was an accusation; she could see that he felt that. Her eyes didn’t move from his. She could see how much he wanted to look away too. They stood there, looking at one another, for only a few seconds, but the priest seemed frozen. Something was happening behind his eyes, something painful was forcing itself into his head, from the dark corner where he had pushed it. But he said nothing.
‘I want to know why she’s dead. You must know something!’ She blurted out the words. ‘I want to know what happened to her.’
‘What
