she needed to see him. She needed to touch him. She pulled him into the room. It was another simple cell; the same bed, table, chair. He took her in his arms and kissed her. And he left the thought that it would soon be over between them somewhere else.
They spent the last night back at the Hotel Danziger Hof. It would be a noisy night in the hotel and in the Kohlenmarkt outside. The bar and the restaurant were already full of Nazi uniforms, black and brown; wives and girlfriends hung on the arms of the uniforms. Trays of beer and sekt circulated in the lobby for anyone who wanted them. It was obvious they had been circulating for some time, and since somewhere the people of Danzig would be picking up the tab for all this the waiters were as drunk as everyone else. As Hannah and Stefan stood at the reception desk two glasses of sekt were thrust into their hands. An SS officer clapped them both on the shoulders and laughed. Words were unnecessary. It was the man who had winked at Hannah that first morning. He winked again. As the hotel manager handed them the key he smiled a satisfied and supercilious smile that said, unmistakably, ‘That’ll show you, you arseholes.’ He still didn’t know who they were, but he knew they were trouble-makers and foreigners, and she was a Jewess. Still, it wouldn’t be very long now before he didn’t have to put up with Jews in his hotel.
They walked towards the staircase. Unless they wanted to join the celebrations the bedroom was the safest place. As they reached the bottom of the stairs the band in the dining room stopped playing abruptly. A ripple of excitement spread through the lobby. There was a crackle of static, very loud. People laughed and then started to grab for every drink in sight. Bottles of sekt were popping all around. There was cheering and applause. The static was coming from speakers that had been fixed to pillars all round the Danziger Hof. Then, as the manager tuned the dial on the radio behind the reception desk, there was music. A military band played. The music faded. ‘Gauleiter Forster will now read the results of the Danzig election.’ Hands shot up in salute. ‘Heil Hitler!’ And then there was an expectant silence.
Stefan and Hannah stood by the stairs, listening with everyone else. There was the rustling of papers and what sounded like a hesitant cough. The voice of the leader of Danzig’s Nazis, the protege of Hitler, Albert Forster, was quiet and deliberate. It felt like a man who was weighing every word. ‘The full count of the votes cast in the election to Danzig’s Volkstag gives yet another victory to the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, another victory for German Danzig, another step on the road to reunification with the fatherland, and another step towards — ’ There was silence. Forster’s voice had become quieter as he spoke. It was hesitancy. This was not a man weighing words to find the right way to celebrate the landslide they all expected — it was a man who didn’t know what to say. ‘Towards victory! Sieg Heil!’ All around Hannah and Stefan people raised their arms again and echoed the cry of victory. But they had all heard the hesitation. There were too many victories in there somehow to believe in victory. Where was the full count they wanted to hear? Where was the ninety per cent of the votes that would sweep away the opposition and the decadent constitution of the League of Nations and the interfering Poles and the High Commissioner and let them do whatever they wished? They weren’t expecting steps; they wanted leaps.
The radio was still silent except for a crackle of static. The station wasn’t ready for such a short speech. It was quiet in the Danziger Hof too. The idea that the result was not the triumph that had been proclaimed beforehand was in every mind, but no one wanted to be the first to say it. Abruptly there was music again as a needle fell heavily on to a record. It was Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. In the ballroom the band took it as a cue. For a few moments Beethoven vied with ‘The Sun Has Got His Hat On’; then the radio was switched off. The buzz of conversation started up at the same time, concerned and surprised and puzzled under the safe, muffling music. Hannah and Stefan turned back to the staircase. A waiter was beside them, with an ice bucket and a bottle of champagne. He smiled a conspiratorial smile.
‘So what happened?’ asked Stefan.
‘Fifty-nine per cent.’ The waiter’s whisper was conspiratorial too; he grinned happily. ‘That’s not much more than they got in the last election.’
‘Why don’t I take that?’ Stefan picked up the bottle of champagne.
‘Help yourself. It’s their money.’
Stefan and Hannah continued up the stairs. She put her arm through his as she had that night in Grafton Street, but there was something more intimate about it now; perhaps it was because all either of them wanted to do was sleep. Downstairs the sense that everything had not gone to plan was already disappearing. Triumph was required and triumph would be delivered. Their faith was in their Fuhrer and their day was coming. The dance floor was full; the corks were popping; everyone was singing. There was no syncopation; the rhythm was a fast, flat march. It was swaggering, insistent, joyless, brutal, mindless, remorseless, irresistible. It would carry on long into the night. ‘He’s been tanning niggers out in Timbuktu, now he’s coming back to do the same to you. So jump into your sunbath, hip-hip-hip-hooray, the sun has got his hat on and he’s coming out today!’
They left the next morning, on the seaplane to Kalmar and Stockholm. As there was now no one in Danzig or Berlin who had ever known anything about a plot to kill Bishop Edward O’Rourke, there was no one with any interest in either Hannah Rosen or Stefan Gillespie. But Sean Lester thought it was still better for them not to travel home through Germany. There were always lists and there were always Nazis with their own view of what working towards the Fuhrer meant. At around the same time as they moved out on to the Dead Vistula from the seaplane station, Father Francis Byrne was being interred in the cathedral cemetery at Oliva. The bodies of Johannes Berent and Leon Kamnitzer, now surplus to requirements, were never found. They had been dumped somewhere in the forests above Danzig. Hugo Keller would find an unmarked grave in Langfuhr. The man called Karl was buried in the cemetery in Oliva too, close to Francis Byrne, after a requiem Mass at the cathedral. His family was given no explanation about where he died or why he had a bullet hole through the back of his head. Kriminaloberassistent Rothe was buried with full Party honours, and after the funeral, to mark his passing, a journalist from the Social Democrat
Now, as the Dornier Delphin lifted up from the muddy waters of the Dead Vistula and banked over Danzig, the sun was shining. Hannah and Stefan looked down. It seemed peaceful enough. But there was no peace of course, and there would be no peace to come. In less than five years Sean Lester would be gone, along with the city’s obstreperous Russian-Irish bishop. The first shots of the Second World War would be fired at the Polish fort on the Westerplatte by a German battleship in the Tote Weichsel. Most of Danzig’s Jews would have left by then; the Great Synagogue would be razed to the ground so no sign of its existence remained. Some of the Free City’s Jews would find safety, but many would simply be rounded up by the Nazis later, somewhere else in Europe, and sent to the ghettos and death camps. In less than ten years the German city of Danzig would be reduced to smouldering rubble by the guns and bombs of the Red Army. A quarter of its population would die in the battle for the city and in the forced marches and deportations that followed. No one would be very interested in mourning them. It was their war after all. And when the city was built again, German brick by German brick, it would be as the Polish city of Gda?nsk; it would only look like the German city of Danzig that once stood in exactly the same place. And the language that had filled its streets and buildings for five hundred years would disappear, along with the people who had once lived there. In all the rebuilding, though, no one would ever bother to rebuild the synagogue.
PART THREE
Freemasonry, the Jews and Communism were among the subjects discussed by the Rev. D. Fahey, C.S.Sp., D.D., in the course of a paper entitled ‘Will Ireland Remain Faithful to Christ the King?’ which he read before delegates to the Catholic Young Men’s Society Convention, at the Gresham Hotel … Wherever, in any country, he said, men had thrown themselves into the stream, of which the agents of Communism controlled the current, the end was slavery under Jewish finance, with the obliteration of the Christian family and the Catholic idea of native
