means, but I do know tomorrow I’m going to book you a first class flight and the best hotel in Hamburg.”
The unsettling judder of rubber on runway made Susannah reconsider her own words. What had she meant? Why exactly was she here? Guilt? Hardly. Perhaps seeing again how unlucky so many others had been – how a whole generation had had their lives and dreams stolen from them – would remind her how lucky she’d been to escape sixty-four years ago. Sure, in the immediate aftermath of the war those feelings had dominated her life. Why had she escaped? What was so special about her? Why hadn’t God taken her and spared some of the young children? Those feeling had controlled her life – almost ended it twice, but she’d fought her demons to leave those memories behind and had pretty much straightened herself out by the 1950s. There had been aberrations during those years – of course there had – but she’d learned the tricks of how to cover up, how to project those feelings of guilt and regret inward, how to brick up the wall when those memories came marching back into her fractured world.
Guilt? After all these years? Of course not. But perhaps this visit would help her put her life – and in particular the fact that it was nearly over – into some sort of perspective. Yes, perhaps that was what it was – seeing that place again might bring her some sort of closure (that was a modern term she hated, but she had to admit it had an accurate ring to it).
Minutes later, with the plane still and her belt removed, she stood, collected her hand luggage, and turned to the aisle. She let out a small shriek as she locked eyes with a gaunt, shaven-headed man inches from her face. A dry swallow turned to breathless panic as her eyes were drawn down to the grimy blanket covering his paperweight frame. She fell back into her seat, squeezing her eyes shut.
“I’m sorry, love,” the man said. “After you.”
She opened her eyes again, and between deep breaths saw him step back and wave a hand to invite her into the aisle. Yes, he was bald, maybe a little slim, and a scruffy grey tee-shirt hung limply down over his jeans. But the accent was English and the face was clean rather than dirty, healthy rather than covered in scabs and pock-marks.
“No,” he said with a kindly smile. “Go on.” He stayed back to give her time to get to her feet, then said, “You sure you’re all right?”
She nodded. “I’m sorry. Yes, I’m fine, thank you. It’s these… these in-flight movies, they send me to sleep and I have…”
“You get nightmares, eh?” He laughed and held out an arm for support as she stepped into the aisle. “I know exactly what you mean. Come on, love.”
She spent the coach journey from the airport to the hotel taking in the city scenery. And thinking. She mainly thought of how the place looked more like any 2009 US city than it did a 1940s German city, what with the cars, the architecture, the clothes, the advertising hoardings for Porsche and McDonalds. Then again, the world had changed so much in her lifetime, what else did she expect?
Indeed, what was she expecting? Why was she wasting her time – her precious time evaporating like water from a frock in the summer sun – visiting old ghosts here, torturing herself?
For four days she pondered that question, only once considering flying straight back home – but she realised that although her clock was ticking, she needed answers more than she needed time. She spent those days milling around the Hamburg shops, restaurants and museums on her own, trying to trigger something that would make her remember what had happened sixty-four years before.
She was still struggling for answers when the time came – when the coach dropped her off with all the other ‘tourists’ outside the gates to the Bergen-Belsen death camp.
The others headed straight for the museum but Susannah stayed at the gate, looking up.
In a flash the clear blue sky was hidden by clouds of hot ash swirling and billowing up above the trees, the perimeter once more formed a barbed wire cage, and she could hear little over the drone of military vehicles. Then she heard boots approaching behind her.
“Excuse me?”
The accent startled her.
“Are you okay?”
The man was dressed in chinos and an open-necked shirt. His smile kept with the smart-casual theme.
Casual is good, Susannah thought. “Yes, thank you,” she said. “I was just… going in, just steadying myself.”
“You’re American, yes?”
She looked once more to the gates. “I guess I am. Do you work here?”
“Yes. In the Visitor Centre.”
She pointed beyond the gates to the path as wide as a street. “Perhaps you can tell me where all the buildings are?”
“Buildings? No, there are no buildings. They were all burned by the British to get rid of the typhus.”
“Oh.”
“I know there’s not much here, but please, go to the Visitor Centre, listen to the talks and see the displays in there. Once you’ve done that it’s a little easier to take a walk through the site and… well, use your imagination.”
She nodded and smiled politely. “Yes, thank you. I think I might manage to do that.”
She followed the man, and when she entered the Visitor Centre a talk was underway, an elderly man telling a group of twenty or thirty people, including children, of the events that took place in times Susannah had long ago forced into the darkest corners of her mind.
Behind the speaker pictures of a slide show faded in and out. There were photographs of the camp as it had been during the war, with wooden cabins in regimented formation. There were also thousands of faces, all gaunt and pleading to the camera, all belonging to people now long, long gone. And Susannah just knew that every single one of them once had dreams of returning to their homes and their normal lives, just as she once did.
Susannah took a seat on the back row and started listening to the speaker talk of how many men were held in the camp, how many men died, how the men suffered.
“Excuse me?” she heard herself ask in a confident but fractured tone. “But weren’t there women prisoners here too?”
“Oh yes,” the speaker replied. “A lot of them; there was even a special women’s camp.”
“Why did they imprison women?” a young girl at the front asked.
“Well, because they were Jewish,” the speaker replied.
And it was then that Susannah started to remember events with a clarity that made her pulse race. Uneasy, almost in tears, she went to stand, but stopped as the girl spoke again.
“Were they treated the same as the men?”
The speaker nodded slowly. “I… I guess so. Except, of course…” He blushed, glancing to the children and lowering his voice. “It’s difficult to explain. The female prisoners, they had, shall we say, other uses to the guards.”
“You mean, as informants?” the girl asked.
“Okay, Lisa,” the woman sitting next to the girl said. “Enough questions.”
“No, no,” the speaker said. “That’s quite all right. The girl is correct. Some of the younger women were very popular with the guards, and those who became, shall we say, good friends with the male guards, went on to become informants, telling them which prisoners were causing difficulties, perhaps those who were likely to lead any rebellion or plan an escape.”
“You mean they were on the side of the Nazis?” the girl asked.
“No,” he said firmly, then hummed a pause. “Well… in what they did, possibly. But never in what they thought. Never.”
“So why would they do that?”
An awkward, sickly smile grew on the speaker’s face. “Because it spared them,” he said.
Susannah now stood, a hand went to cover her face, and she shuffled away, trembling.
At the door a member of staff placed a consoling hand on her shoulder. “Are you okay, madam?”
Susannah kept her head down and gave a single, almost imperceptible nod.
“I know it’s hard sometimes. Bad memories are common around here. Your feelings are nothing to be ashamed of. You’ve been her
e before, yes?”
She shook her head and wiped the dribbles from the end of her nose. “No,” she said firmly. “Not me. Never. But thank you.”
She stumbled out into the daylight and sat on a bench for a while, but could not settle. She got up and soon found herself blindly meandering along the main paths, beneath the pines that towered overhead.
The man conducting the talk had been right. Apart from the Visitor Centre there were hardly any buildings, just wide open spaces covered in that spreading ivy and bramble, and also with heather and wildflowers sporadically breaking through the long grass. It could have been a nature reserve.
Almost.
And as she continued her walk, unsure whether or not to be grateful that the camp only barely resembled its original form, she recovered her composure and started to appreciate the afternoon sunshine warming her face.
“Sixty-four years,” she mumbled to herself, looking at the empty spaces. “And I could be in a different city. Or country.” She inhaled the scent of pine for a few minutes, and listened to nothing but birdsong.
Then her shoulders jolted at the gunshot and her head dipped instinctively. She looked up and saw not lofty pine trees but latticework lookout towers; she turned to the side and saw not open space but a pit, and smelt not the heady freshness of pine but something that made her cover her mouth and turn away. She hurried as much as her antiquated joints allowed, keeping to the paths that took her as far away from the pit as possible, until after two or three