A Possible Life by Sebastian Faulks Read Free Book Online Page A

They would find the British officer in charge the next day, no doubt, and make contact through him with the Red Cross; he would want to get word to his parents in Hampshire and arrange for some parcels.
    They awoke to shouted orders in Polish from a man who appeared to be a kind of dormitory prefect. Another Polish prisoner, this one more of a head boy, then inspected the block before ushering in two SS officers; it was a little like occupied France in the way the Germans had persuaded the vanquished to do the dirty work for them. Hundreds of shaven-headed men stood shivering beside their bunks; one or two appeared too ill to move and, on the orders of the SS, were pulled out by the others. Two were already dead and were dragged from the block by their hands. An older man who could no longer stand unaided fell to the ground by the drainage channel, where a German shot him through the head. Trembath leapt forward to remonstrate, but Geoffrey grabbed his arm.
    A cauldron of soup was brought in on a wheeled wagon to the end of the room and the men went forward in silence to receive their ration. With no plate or bowl, Geoffrey could take only the bread, though to judge by the emaciated state of the prisoners he was not missing much in the soup. There followed a roll call that took almost two hours, the men standing in rows while SS men counted them off in an alley between two of the brick blocks. Then they were marched towards the camp gate, and Geoffrey for the first time could see what kind of place he had come to.
    They were in marshy land with pine forests all round them; in the distance he could make out mountains, or their foothills. The camp itself had obviously been built for some other purpose before the war. The watchtowers were set into the perimeter fence at intervals of about a hundred yards and did not look particularly tall or robust; there was a second barrier of rolled barbed wire, while the main fence, to judge from the regularly spaced junction boxes, was electrified. Geoffrey walked next to Trembath through the gate of the camp and down a metalled road for about twenty minutes before the SS guards ordered them to stop at a building site. They were given shovels and told to start working; their job was to dig a drainage channel along the edge of the field.
    Geoffrey could understand nothing of what the other prisoners, who were either Russian or Polish, were saying to one another. He felt as though he had become lost in someone else’s war – some Transylvanian or Slavic nightmare that had nothing to do with Mr Green or the Musketeers. Who were all these East Europeans with their terrible histories, pine forests and slaughters? What had they to do with democracy and the RAF?
    ‘These men look broken,’ Trembath said from the corner of his mouth, working next to Geoffrey, glancing at his starved fellow prisoners. ‘I think we need to set an example.’
    ‘Not yet,’ said Geoffrey. ‘We need to know more before we start planning an escape, if that’s what you’re thinking.’
    ‘It’s our duty,’ said Trembath.
    Geoffrey stood up to stretch his back from an hour of digging and felt a sudden, excruciating pain in his side. An SS man with a whip stood behind him. The Pole to Geoffrey’s right made a downward gesture with his arm: stay bent over, don’t stand up. Along the line, Geoffrey saw an old Slav do what he had done – stand and stretch. An SS man drove a rifle butt into his face; when the man next to him went to help, they shot him through the knee. Another German officer, drawn by the sound, walked over to see what had happened. He took out his pistol and, to the amusement of his fellow guards, shot the man through the other knee as well. The prisoners bent down to the ditch and did not raise their heads.
    They worked for twelve hours digging with a half-hour break in the middle of the day, when a motor lorry brought water, a piece of bread and more soup. The site itself, perhaps twenty