Black Cross

surrounded him. A single guttering candle flickered on the floor. He had never seen such eyes before, not even in the faces of soldiers unmanned in the midst of great carnage. Eyes like black mirrors, at once shallow and bottomless. He had the feeling that if he pressed his finger to one of those eyes, it would shatter and fall inward through a black cavern of grief and loss that could never be filled.

He had learned much in his short time here. He’d asked a few questions about the histories of the women, mostly to keep up the fiction of gathering intelligence for Zionist leaders in Palestine and London. But when he heard some of the answers, all else went out of his mind for a while. Each story was a variation on the same theme: We were doing all right; Hitler came to power; the rich fled; the Nazis came to our town, our village, our city, our house, our flat; they killed my father, my mother, my husband, my sons, my uncles, my sisters, my daughter, my grandparents. And almost every story ended with the same line: I am the last of my family.

As the women spoke, Stern learned that the Block Leader’s death and the brutal reprisals that followed had thrown the block into disarray, and that the young Dutchwoman who questioned him had assumed the dead Pole’s position by default. He had made up his mind to ask her the question he had risked his life to come here and ask, when she said:

“How do you plan to get out of the camp, Herr Stern?”

He knew what was coming. Some of the women had begun to dream of escape. He had to discourage them. They could not know that he had no intention of leaving the vicinity of the camp until — until what? Until he had killed them all, of course.

“Herr Stern?” Rachel said again.

“I’m walking out through the front gate. The same way I got in.”

Rachel was silent for some moments. “But that doesn’t make sense. An SS man without transportation?”

Stern shifted uncomfortably. “I told you before, this uniform is SD: Sicherheitsdienst. More feared even than the Gestapo. Not even the SS question the SD.”

Stern saw a flash of hope in her dark eyes. “I have a favor to ask of you,” Rachel said. “A great favor.”

“I can’t take you out,” he said quickly.

“Not me. My child.”

He stared at her. “You have a child here?”

“Two. A boy and a girl.”

“And you want . . . you want me to take only one child?”

The young woman took hold of his hand and squeezed, her eyes blazing with urgency. “Better that one have a chance at life than both die,” she said. “And they will surely die if they stay here!”

Stern saw desperation her eyes, but also a fierce determination. She meant what she said.

“They are very small,” she said in a pleading voice that drove Stern into a rage of shame and impotence. “You could easily carry one—”

Stern jerked his hand away. The realization that this woman had so honestly confronted the impossibility of her own survival that she would give up her child to a stranger shook him to his core. He stared into the ring of faces surrounding him, searching for some sign of censure.

None of the other women seemed shocked by Rachel’s request.

In Anna’s cellar, McConnell had finally found the diary entry he was searching for. It was near the end, dated only two weeks ago.

2-1-44 More and more civilians are being killed by Allied bombs. In case I do not survive the war, I will here speak a little about things almost too painful to face. I know what the world will ask about me. How could this woman have stood by and watched these horrible things? She was a civilian. She was a nurse! She did not have to do these things. No one held a gun to her head. Well, that is both true and false. I am a civilian, but I live in Nazi Germany at war. And I knew enough about Klaus Brandt after one week here to know that a request to be transferred might mean death. Brandt has absolute power in Totenhausen. If he orders your death, you are dead. Only Sturmbannfuhrer Schorner seems unafraid of him. I think Schorner saw too much death in Russia to be afraid of anything.

Some will call me a coward for not leaving this place, for not refusing to participate in these experiments, even at the cost of my life. Am I a coward? Yes. I have lain shivering in my bed with nightmares of Hauptscharfuhrer Sturm beating down the door of my cottage to arrest me and take me to the Tree. I have been close to suicide. But the world’s condemnation means little. Not all the torturers in the world could cause me the agony I have felt when the beseeching eyes of dying children looked to me for help, and I could not give it.

I have an answer for the world, but no excuse. When I first arrived at Totenhausen, I was already severely depressed, due to the fact that my lover had been murdered by the SS in Berlin. When I realized what actually went on here, I believe I entered a state of deep shock. After I regained some perspective, getting away from Totenhausen became my only thought. But then I considered my situation. If Brandt allowed me to leave the camp, I would succeed in distancing myself from the crimes. But the crimes would still go on. They would continue just as before, but unseen by anyone who was disturbed by them, as I was. I felt like a little fish swimming inside a tidal wave. I could try to swim in the other direction, but the wave would thunder on. For many days I hardly spoke. Then I decided I had been sent to this hell for one reason: to be a witness. To record what I saw. This I have done, and continue to do. I have become hardened to things that would shame a murderer. But I no longer think of suicide. Now I pray that I will survive this war. I pray that my diary will be the noose that finally snaps Klaus Brandt’s fat neck. I worry sometimes that I am beyond saving, that I am damned in the eyes of God. But more often I wonder if God even sees this place. How could God exist in the same universe with Totenhausen Camp?

McConnell closed the diary. He had found the reassurance he sought. Even in this crucible of human depravity, some measure of hope — of human integrity — survived. Anna Kaas had rebelled against the madness she described. But her rebellion was not the empty whining of political dilettantes. She had not offered impotent, moralizing words and then retired into the wings of rationalization or self-delusion. Nor had she committed some brave but vain act of self-sacrifice, as McConnell might have done. She had done something far more difficult. She had sacrificed her humanity in order to attempt the only thing that might ever have some real effect on the men who committed the horrors she witnessed each day — to tell the world what they were doing.

When he realized this, McConnell also understood something else. That Anna Kaas had accomplished something no one before her ever had. She had changed his fundamental belief about the futility of violence. All his life he had stood with his father against war. But tonight, simple written words had bred a cold light that revealed to him something worse than war — or perhaps a new kind of war — a war of mankind upon itself. A self- consuming madness that could only end in complete annihilation. His medical experience gave him the perfect metaphor for his new understanding.

Cancer.

The system that had created Totenhausen — and the dozen other camps he had read of in the diary — was a malignant melanoma festering within the human species. It moved maliciously, under cover of a more conventional malady, but it would eventually destroy everything in its path. And like any melanoma, it could not be stopped without destroying healthy tissue in the process.

As he sat with the closed book on his lap, McConnell came to a conclusion inconceivable to him before tonight. If his father — a physician and combat veteran who had preached nonviolence for twenty years — could by some magic read Anna Kaas’s diary, and then come face to face with Doctor Klaus Brandt . . .

He would shoot him down like a mad dog.

“For the last time, I cannot do it!” Stern said. “It will be a miracle if I escape alive. With a child I would have no chance.”

He forced himself to look away from Rachel Jansen’s face. A light had gone out behind her eyes. Where there had been hope, he saw only ashes. “I want to ask you something,” he said. “All of you. Come closer.”