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.
I acknowledge that I have shamed my family by my actions on the night of 20 April 1945, and have contaminated the blood strain of my relatives.
Rolf Hegner
He watched the seals roll on the sandspit and heave their bulk towards the water. They basked, they dived, and had innocence.
He had sat beside the bed in the clinic, had held his uncle's hand and comforted him. He had believed him to be a good man. His own innocence had gone inside the lawyer's office. A week afterwards he and Gertrud had fled the city where the school was and he had set up home on the island, hoping to distance himself from the torments… His family, his blood, his guilt, which lit a fierce fury in him.
'How long have you been here?' A harsh voice rang in Alicia's ear.
It was her aunt – her housekeeper and minder.
The refuge for Timo Rahman's wife was the summer-house among the tall oaks at the back of the house.
When self-esteem fled her, when she lay on her back and he slept beside her, snoring through his open mouth, when the isolation of her life seemed to crush her, she came to the summer-house. He never did.
Everything inside the main house had been changed after he had purchased it: new kitchen, new decoration, new carpets and curtains, new furniture, all in the style that he believed was suitable. Outside, the flowerbeds had been uprooted, then turfed over: an ornamental garden would require continuous attention, would need maintenance from strangers or would become a wilderness. Only the summer-house was hers. Built of old, untreated timbers and planking, nearly waterproof, it was set against the fence and the hedge – and the security wire on stanchions, the alarm sensors – and was masked by trees from the rear windows of the house. It was hers because he had no interest in it. He never sat, relaxed. He never idled, and the clock was an enemy to him.
The dawn light was behind her aunt, silhouetting her stout peasant hips and shoulders.
'I could not sleep,' Alicia said feebly.
All areas of her life had been arranged. The marriage in the mountains of Albania had been arranged by her father and his father. The timing of her two daughters' conception had been arranged by Timo and a gynaecologist in the city. The fitting out of her home in Blankenese had been arranged by Timo and her aunt. The schools for the girls had been arranged by Timo and a lawyer who lived four streets away. Her clothes were chosen by her aunt, and the food for the family meals… Everything arranged, everything chosen. She was decorative, expected to stay attractive and keep her waist narrow, but she was not required to make any contribution to her husband's life. Beyond the hedge, the fence and the wire were the gardens of German women – smart, chic professionals – whose names she barely knew, whose lives she could hardly imagine, whose language she did not speak. Only in the summer-house could she find peace. The aunt had travelled with her from Albania, but the woman's loyalty was first to Timo Rahman.
'You could catch a chill out here.'
'I needed the air,' Alicia said limply.
'You want for nothing.'
'There is nothing I want.'
The aunt bored on: 'You have the love of your husband and your children.'
'I do.'
'You have a home to be in, and a bed.'
'Yes.'
'And a husband you should please.' The aunt leered.
What she knew of sex, how to 'please' and where her hands should go, had been taught her by the aunt, a demonstration with the woman's coarse hands guiding her fingers over the body flab – but what she had learned had been used to conceive the daughters, then to try for a son. When the boy-child had not come
– as if it were understood between them – Timo no longer pulled her over and hoisted up her nightdress.
He had no other woman, she knew that. She thought he had no more interest in fucking her, doing what dogs
