Happy Ant-Heap by Norman Lewis Read Free Book Online Page A

was beginning at this point to question how much of this catalogue of horrors it was necessary to include in the report. A vague multitude of men had vanished from the earth as if through a monstrous conjuring trick. No more than a legend, eventually to be forgotten. The figures were guesswork. Those who had kept records had themselves been swept away, so there were to be no names on Russian memorials, no epitaphs to be inscribed. As García Lorca had written of a single brave man killed by a bull, ‘a stinking silence settled down’.
    We walked on and Poldau spoke eagerly, as solitary men sometimes do, of his childhood and background, and reverently of the skilful surgery of modern warfare as demonstrated in the blitzkrieg by which France had been overthrown in a matter of weeks, compared with those slogging years of trench warfare in the First World War. Only the snow had put an end to Germany’s dream of carrying its eastern frontiers as far as the Urals. ‘Not only Germany but Europe has been defeated,’ he said, ‘and Bolshevism remains intact.’
    I returned him to prison, finished the report and took it to the Staff Officer (Intelligence), a classical scholar whose habit it was to slip admiring references to Caesar’s campaigns into discussions of the military chaos of Austria. Major Stevens was a worrier also, distraught at that moment at the news that Russian Asiatic troops had broken into the town and were chasing all the women in sight. He ran through the report. ‘My God,’ he said. ‘This man mustn’t be allowed to slip through our fingers.’
    ‘He won’t. He comes into the arrestable categories. Pending further investigations, we can hold him as long as we like. But that’s as far as it goes.’
    ‘Even if he was involved in mass killings?’
    ‘That has to be proved.’
    ‘You say here he was at Salsk. Isn’t that the camp where Russian Jewish prisoners were forcibly fed with excrement and drowned in urine?’
    ‘Poldau denies that the Final Solution was ever employed in the Stalags. He admits the death total was high, but says that prisoners died of diseases, hunger and the cold.’
    ‘What was this man doing in Engelsdorf?’
    ‘He was sending back stories he’d made up about Austrian separatists so that they’d keep him here. He knew that Germany was finished and decided to lie low until it was all over. His plan was to stay here until things settled down, then change his identity and go home.’
    ‘Could we use him?’
    ‘In what way, sir?’
    ‘It’s been confirmed that war-criminal trials are to be held. This man was there. He’s seen it all. He would make a sensational witness. Perhaps he could be sounded out?’
    ‘In a way that’s already been done. I believe he would agree to anything we propose.’
    ‘With some sort of inducement no doubt?’
    ‘It might help.’
    ‘There’s little we could offer. All these people will have to be let go in the end. Might be able to speed up the process, that’s all. Any question of financial inducements has to be ruled out.’
    ‘Money doesn’t interest him. He’s an abstemious sort of man. Strangely infantile. He had a collection of toy railway engines and is fond of animals. He mentioned he’d carried a white rat as a mascot through the Russian campaign. It died through eating unsuitable food. He likes painting.’
    ‘What does he paint?’
    ‘Sea views.’
    ‘Is he married?’
    ‘No. He is too devoted to his mother, he told me, to marry. The worst thing for him about the Eastern Front was that her letters took up to three months to come through.’
    ‘In a way none of this surprises me,’ Stevens said.
    ‘It didn’t surprise me either, sir.’
    ‘Any thoughts as to what might help to bind him to our purpose?’
    ‘So far as I’m concerned, discussions are complete and as soon as they’re ready, he’ll be sent to one of the camps in Germany. They’re opening one near Bremen, where his mother lives. If it could be