Ghostheart by R.J. Ellory Read Free Book Online

though more times than she could recall she had challenged the justice and equity of God, it was during these times that she realized with utter certainty that God could not exist. Her spirit broken, the freedom she had once sought with Jozef now shattered beyond repair, she breathed solely because she could not stop herself; she slept because her body could stand no longer, and she survived each hour, each minute, each second, simply for her son.
    Elena endured her ignominy and anguish in silence, a shell of who she once was. She watched as her fellow Jews and Poles were shipped out to Birkenau, Treblinka, Sobibor, and perhaps – had it not been for her son – she would have run to them, clung to them in her despair and begged to be taken in the trucks, in the horse-carriages to something that could only be better than this. At least silent, without agony, a vacuum of pain.
    But her son kept her alive. She watched him grow in stunted inches, watched his eyes deepen, hollow out, perhaps the only future conceived that of taking him away from this, if only beyond the gates, the wires and the sentry towers into the woods, the fields that stretched out as far as the eye could see. Somewhere out there was a world, a world she had lost, hadbeen torn from, her voice shredded with pain, her heart thundering with fear and a profound lack of comprehension. Sometimes she believed she had died, and for her sins with Jozef she was consigned forever to this hell, but somehow, through this blackness of pain and humiliation she remembered his eyes, his genius, his imagination, and understood that a love such as this could never have sentenced her to such a term of punishment.
    Kiel did not speak with her, he barked, he ordered her to her knees, onto her back, her stomach. He pulled her by her hair, often tearing clumps from her scalp when it grew back over the seared brand, and then he would sodomise her once more, burying his fingernails in her breasts and gritting his teeth as he hurt her, causing pain that at last left her insensate and numb.
    April of 1945 found the Allies in Berlin, Americans and Russians meeting at Torgau on the Elbe, troop carriers and tanks rolling onwards in the heart of the Reich. With these events came the liberation of Flossenbürg, Buchenwald, Mauthausen, and the full realization of what had taken place. The soldiers – victorious, elated – grew subdued, stunned, silent and sickened as they drove through the corridors of bodies, saw a heap of unclothed women prisoners eighty yards in length, thirty yards wide and four feet high. Buchenwald still housed over twenty thousand prisoners, many of them beyond all help – stick-thin, suffering from typhus, starvation and tuberculosis. In the days that followed, despite every effort from the Allies, more than six hundred human beings were buried daily. A wheeled scaffold stood against the skyline, from which hung a dozen beaten and broken bodies; the air was thick with the stench of rotting corpses, dead of disease and starvation, gassing and slaughter.
    Soldiers in their late teens and early twenties liberated Dachau. Soldiers who walked amongst the dead with the eyes of men three times their age. Piles of human ashes, unburned bones, hair shorn from the newly dead, toys taken from children as they were led to the ‘showers’ – the gaschambers into which men, women and children had been herded in their tens of thousands – and ‘sound machines’ built to mask the horror of screaming. The Allies had discovered the Final Solution, the attempted extinction of a race.
    Elena Kruszwica was there to see the soldiers, standing ankle-deep in mud in the small garden behind Wilhelm Kiel’s barrack, there as her now seven-year-old son clung to her leg, asking her who these people were as she fell to her knees, as she heard the screams and shouts of the SS troops being herded into the central square of the camp for surrender to the Americans. Kiel was there, his