Black Cross

always said you were a tough old girl, but you are not so old, and no one should have to spend their life with only memories.

Not one day of my life passed without you in my thoughts. I know the same was true for David. God bless you and keep you.

Your son,

Mark

He sealed each letter in a separate envelope, then wrote a short covering letter asking the don he billeted with to forward the letters to Georgia if he had not heard from Mark in ninety days. He laid both envelopes on top of the letter, blew out the candle and went back to bed. This time sleep did not elude him. It came without warning and without dreams — a sleep so deep it was almost like death.

At one-twenty a.m. Brigadier Duff Smith’s telephone rang for the last time that night.

“Smith here,” he answered.

“I gave it my best shot, Brigadier.”

The Scotsman leaned back in his chair. “You earned your money, Corporal.”

“It worked?” asked the voice.

“I wrote the bloody script, didn’t I?”

“Christ, sir, you did that all right. I felt so sorry for the poor bastard I could barely tell the story. It was the details that clinched it. And the plaster cast. Wow. It was like it really happened. It was easy.”

“That story was not fiction, Corporal. It has really happened.”

“Jeez, it really got to me, hurting the guy that bad.”

“You don’t want the money, then?”

“Hey, I want every fucking cent. I earned it. Five hundred simoleans.”

Brigadier Smith chuckled cynically. “I foresee a stellar career for you in the American cinema, Corporal.”

He hung up the telephone, consulted a calendar, scrawled a few notes on a pad, then made his last call of the night. It was answered by a male secretary, but after eight minutes the brigadier was rewarded with the unmistakable voice of Winston Churchill.

“I hope this is bloody important, Duff,” the prime minister growled. “You pulled me away from the Marx Brothers.”

“The doctor is in, Winston.”

There was a pause. “How soon can you get here?”

“By the end of the film, probably.”

“Don’t let any Yanks see you, Duff. They’re creeping around London like phantoms at the bloody opera.”

“Pour me a Glenfiddich, if you have it.”

“Done.”

15

A woman was speaking Yiddish in the darkness. She spoke with the guttural inflections of Eastern Europe, but Rachel Jansen had no trouble understanding her. She would have understood even if she had not known Yiddish. Despair needs no translation.

Every woman in the block had gathered in a tight circle around a guttering candle hooded by a tin can. They sat on the floor with their knees under them, listening like mourners in a dark temple. The candlelight did little to smooth their stark, prematurely old faces, and it absolutely died in the hollows of their eyes. All but Frau Hagan wore the yellow triangle on their shifts.

Rachel had never seen or imagined anything like this ritual. The women called it der Ring — the Circle. Each night they gathered in this way and spoke by turns, emptying their memories. Children were banished from the block during the Circle, and Rachel soon learned why. The stories told here would have plunged children’s minds into black depression and nightmares, scarring them forever. They were difficult enough for adults to endure. But every woman in the room already bore indelible scars. What could it hurt to hear others reveal their own? At least they could share their misery.

But sharing misery was not the purpose of the Circle. Its purpose was to record. A woman called the Scribe wrote down in shorthand everything that was said, paying particular attention to names, dates, and places. Each night the Scribe’s annotated record was hidden in a space behind the wall where insulation would be, had insulation been provided for the barracks, which it had not. After hearing a single night’s entries into that record, Rachel had known she would never have the courage to read the full text. It was no less than a testament of the unwillingness — or perhaps worse, the inability — of God to protect his servants.

With great effort she managed to block out the speaker’s voice. She admired the purpose of the Circle, but for the past four nights she had used this time to digest whatever she had learned during the day, and to try to apply that knowledge to her family’s survival. Unlike the other new widows, who walked through the camp in various states of lethargy, Rachel strained to catch every conversation, sifting each for some scrap of information that might help protect her children.

Already she had experienced extremes of hope and despair. First she had learned that if she and her family had been captured a few months earlier, her children would never have been picked out of the line at Auschwitz, but sent directly to its gas chambers. But with international pressure building against the rumors of Nazi death camps, the SS had decided to create special “family sections” inside certain camps. Red Cross inspectors would be allowed admittance at the front gate, then steered down prepared routes to areas where they would witness scenes of family life not so different from that outside the camp fence, albeit with fewer material comforts. They would leave confident that the grisly rumors were the exaggerations of frightened Jews.

Frau Hagan told Rachel that when Reichsfuhrer Himmler mentioned this program to Herr Doktor Brandt, Brandt had jumped at the chance. And the system had brought certain benefits. A few families were spared the agony of forced separation, which Frau Hagan claimed was worse than death for some, as she had seen such separations drive mothers to suicide. But the odd thing was, since the adoption of the family camp system, not one Red Cross inspector had ever been granted admittance to Totenhausen.

It was not until yesterday that Rachel learned why, and the answer had left her in a permanent state of terror. It seemed that, until recently, Klaus Brandt’s talents were not sufficiently taxed by his poison gas experiments on behalf of Reichsfuhrer Himmler. As a hobby he had taken up private researches into the etiology of spinal meningitis. Some said he had done this with an eye toward developing patentable medicines with which he could make a fortune after the war. In any case, Brandt’s research used up children at a staggering rate, as his normal method was to inject meningococcus bacteria into healthy spines, then chart the effectiveness or failure of various compounds against the infection. Brandt’s adoption of the family camp system insured a constant flow of children for his experiments.

Frau Hagan claimed the meningitis research had slowed considerably in recent weeks, but Rachel was not comforted. The thought that Jan or Hannah could be plucked from the Appellplatz at any moment and taken to the “hospital” to have deadly bacteria injected into their bodies was simply too horrifying to shut out. The thought that any children were at risk of this — that some in fact were dying in agony in the hospital on this very night — kept her in a constant state of near panic. She now devoted every waking moment to discovering some way to have her children exempted from these experiments.

A sudden sob from the Circle broke her train of thought. A listener had been moved to tears by the speaker’s words. Rachel found herself drawn into the narrative by morbid fascination. The speaker’s story was so much more harrowing than her own. It made her nervous to think what she would say when her turn came.

“The trucks were in the square,” the woman said, determinedly focusing her eyes on the bare floorboards, as if her old village were standing there in miniature. “The SS beat everyone out of their homes. Those who were too