The minicab driver was in a miserable state, though he was a particularly miserable creature to start with having a very dilapidated body for a man of his age including a lack of teeth. He only had three all stained brown with nicotine, and his breath wasn't going to win him any favours either. His misery was growing by the minute: he was stuck between a rock and a very determined woman from the farm. My mother informed him I'd left by another entrance at least half an hour ago. I could be anywhere. His cab was a mess, his trousers soiled, his luck gone, and now he had to tell the lovely Hartley Sparrow he'd lost me. She finished the one -way conversation, “If any of your friends come up here I will not hesitate to shoot. There's nothing here for your kind but lead! Take this message to anybody who's interested!”
I was going to enjoy a good night's sleep in my old bed, tucked up warm with cocoa, all supplied by my ferocious mother, a woman who'd rediscovered herself on that damp moonlit night. She was still full of fury at my father's untimely death, but had stepped out from under a blanket of grief. I know she didn't blame me for his death, because she was unaware of our fight and would never learn of it. My tough mother had defended her cubs like a wounded lioness. All I hoped was the cab driver shit himself as well. I know I would have!
The next morning was a big surprise for me as 6am was something I haven't seen in a long time. I was on a farm after all. Jane missed work phoning in to say she had a headache which in some ways wasn't far from the truth; she had a shiner from the massive ham-fist of a blow delivered by Beatrix. The aunties were left in peace, and this was not just so they could rest. This move was considered prudent so that we could search their cottage, their intimate items, without their knowledge. My mother insisted we never ever tell the aunties the real reason for the madness. We should suggest perhaps one of the bottles had got some form of botulism or some other such food poisoning that my auntie had a bad reaction to. Perhaps she was lucky to be alive. Violet was.
This was a good explanation because it gave us a good reason for the missing bottles. Iris wanted to get rid of them permanently at first. Then she realised they might be a bargaining chip if I were to avoid some evil fate. Whether they were going to kill me or not, I didn't know, neither did my family. We didn't want to take any risks so the six little bottles were moved back down to the farmhouse and stashed carefully away in my mother's hidden private safe, not the farm safe.
I took one bottle with me, the little bottle with the green label to demonstrate if the need arose that I was in possession of the stuff, and the rest of it was safely stashed away. This seemed to be a very thin insurance policy, a sort of whole life with no profits policy. They could torture me to reveal the location of the stash in my mother's safe, and I could think of two or three people who would enjoy the job.
We conducted a thorough search during which I spent ages staring at different objects, looking trancelike at different pieces of furniture, various cubbyholes, and anything to ignite the fire of memory. In two hours there'd been no inspirations. It was now 8:30am on Monday morning with my evening trip to The Cauldron approaching too quickly, and not a penny found. The only money available was the £1000 I found in the vacuum cleaner, but I suspected it was part of my profits, not part of the missing £10,000! How was I to know?
Where to next? I needed inspiration if I were to survive.
I was resting outside in the cool morning sunshine. In some small corner of my body somewhere not detectable by medical tests, I was starting to feel slightly better. Not a great leap forward in bursting physical health, more of a subtle change. The number of pills I was taking every day had gone down to about fourteen which is quite a low number when you're suffering from this illness. To me I was taking far too many of these damned drugs, and a future without the constant tyranny of medication will be just fine by me. When I think about it, having a future even with some pills is also fine by me.
Doing anything physical for more than half an hour was almost impossible leaving me wrung out like an old dish rag. One day I walked a dog very slowly for about six hundred yards. On the return I had to go to bed and rest for several hours. Inside me the feeling of total fatigue nagged at my psyche. I was like a torch fitted with very old batteries functioning in a limited way, throwing out a dim light of little use. I functioned in a way that was alive, not really living.
Other people had suffered far more than I ever would. I continued fighting my inner diseases with other people's terrible experiences.
Rachel focused on Abraham's relationship with Heinrich Haussler, the SS officer who picked him out for special attention. Whether the attention was special is debatable. The German officer was bored, often seeking out little games to play. He may have had a dozen different people he played mind games with. Sometimes, if deep boredom set in, he would turn his little games violent in a fatal way. This was his way of passing some time. He would have preferred to have been killing real soldiers, not eliminating a bunch of bankers and tailors.
Heinrich's other victims did not matter to Abraham. The only thing on his mind was staying alive until freedom came. The Russian roulette was now over which meant the meagre supply of hard bread and cheese was no longer available. Two weeks had passed since the last terrifying click of the revolver including moments later when the German opened the chamber of the gun and placed five more bullets in it. After doing this he spun the chamber around and pointed the gun at Abraham's head and laughed to himself. “I haven't finished with you yet. I'll think of something else. Go!” Haussler said, with his usual smile.
Rachel told me she thought this long-term stress, coupled with the appalling concentration camp diet, was what led to Abraham's heart attack some thirty years later. I wasn't sure about this as Abraham Wilson, by the time of his death, had grown to a considerable size, making up for all the years of desperate hunger through the 1940s. As a few family dinners round the table at their house had revealed to me, Abraham possessed a voracious appetite. This and the fact that Rachel swears he was killed by a Mercedes, a German car doesn't really add up. However, this is Rachel's story.
In her story he was killed by a Mercedes car. In fact he was more likely to have been killed by the
patisserie
he was heading for across the busy high street to purchase God knows how many cakes. The car didn't manage to hit Mr Wilson. The driver applied his brakes producing a massive screech of tyres as a large man in a suit stepped out into the road. The driver's hand was pressed hard on the chrome horn rim in the centre of the steering wheel producing a very loud Teutonic bellow. This made Abraham jump forward with surprise, and even break into a lumbering run for a few strides. When he reached the sidewalk surprised and breathless his heart was pumping on adrenaline, its cholesterol filled arteries fighting to supply the muscle. It was all too much for a man who'd overindulged for thirty years. He dropped dead right there on the pavement in the doorway of the
patisserie
, a massive coronary taking his life in seconds. After surviving all those years on a knife edge it came to this, death by cake knife.
Rachel likes to believe that without the shock her beloved husband would have gone on for decades. He may have lasted another month or had a mild heart attack alerting the doctors to his problems. This could have led to surgery or a bypass operation, but it would not have been as straightforward as today with the technology used in 1985. However, it might have given him a chance. That is, of course, if he'd had a mild heart attack and was somewhere near help. Abraham suffered a huge coronary outside the very food emporium that had helped to clog his overburdened arteries.
Back at the camp Abraham had lived through the last four or five days of the thirty day Russian roulette thinking that Heinrich would let him believe he would live, only to shoot him on the last day. No matter what he ate it never stayed inside him, the constant stress and the diseases of the camp making his bowels weak. Heinrich hadn't killed him on the last day, but it was a two-pronged sword. It gave hope, but he knew the officer would think of something else. Rachel told me about the last great torture.
The cold in the winter was horrible with a poor diet and the inadequate clothes letting in the terrible biting, icy wind. The summer coming was even worse. It spelt the beginning of disease breeding with a voracious appetite for human flesh. There were the flies, millions upon millions of flies. In all the rest of his life Abraham couldn't bear a single fly in the house. His paranoia about these creatures was profound. In the accounting shed the heat was starting to build, sweat was dripping from his forehead, and the sergeant in charge didn't like marks on the paper. Even if everything else was covered with a layer of filth, the accounting paperwork of the Third Reich had to be perfect.
It was in this environment along with a few other accountants and former bankers that Heinrich delivered his final psychological test. The German decided to create a fiction that somehow a devious Abraham was now helping him. Others could believe this because even with the starvation he had a metabolism that hung on to some of his fat. He wasn't very large, but compared to the others he was positively glowing with health even if this included a grey skin parlour. Occasionally one of the others zealously pointed out he looked remarkably healthy, almost suggesting he had secret supplies because he was passing information.
Rachel told me he remembered the day with a vivid frightening recollection. He was sitting at his desk when Heinrich entered the room and strolled over in a casual friendly manner, then insisted Abraham were to go immediately to his office. All this was spoken loudly as if to tell the others how special this man was. He had no choice but to do as ordered, and discover his final torture.
Heinrich suggested many things he could do to him; have him throw children's bodies into the ovens, or he could chat to people as they arrived assuring them the showers were really good, and they had nothing to fear. Abraham either snapped inside or found great courage when he told Heinrich to kill him because he wasn't going to do that to his own people. He'd already killed to stay alive, but something inside him said he wasn't going to betray anybody else.
“You are very brave Jew, and very lucky. I don't want to kill you yet. I want your own people to kill you, and if they don't before the end of this war, I will!” the Nazi officer confided to him. To Abraham's great surprise the officer told him the Russians were getting close. It had been a rumour in the camp for a few weeks, and nobody believed it. Everyone thought the promise of liberation so close was a cruel joke. He confided he wouldn't be there when the Russians or the Americans arrived in their push towards Berlin.
What he did tell Abraham, however, was if his own people hadn't killed him by then, just before he left, he would put several bullets in his stomach. He would die an agonising death. There was no escape from his death camp. In the meantime he would be his friend, his closest buddy, somebody who was always there for a laugh and a joke.
Two days later in the accounting shed it was midday and hot. There were so many gold teeth, dozens of spectacles, various bits of jewellery, anything that could be exchanged for money or goods to power the Reich's defiance of the Allied advance. There was always somebody willing to sell them armaments through the back door if the price was right, and the gold collected was of good quality.
He didn't realise Heinrich was standing behind him watching over his shoulder. Then the arm was around him, Heinrich loudly proclaimed his clothes to be disgusting and he would fix him up with something better within the day. After all, he was a very special man. The others in the shed watched intently without apparently moving their eyes away from their work. They watched in the way of the camp, in a way you'd never notice. Not for one second would they dare to fix the German in the eye. For that single moment of contact they could be beaten to death on the spot, or just kicked around for half an hour, then shot or left with injuries so bad they would die the same night. All of them secretly witnessed this exchange and were shocked.
Abraham prayed new clothes wouldn't arrive. Unfortunately he was taken away at seven in the evening by a young officer and instructed to pick out of the pile of clothes something not too good, but a lot better than what he was wearing. These should be clean and of good quality, clothes that would be his death sentence. Others looked on in disbelief as Abraham returned to the squalid dormitories dressed in quality clothing. All they had were meagre rags made of dirty paper.
“Why has he got those clothes? What has he done to deserve them? Is he a quisling, the big informer?” This was on all their lips. Very few would believe this was a form of torture. How can you be tortured when you're given good clothes, and look at him, he's not even thin. This was only the first day of suspicion.
He explained to anybody who would listen that the German was picking him out for some terrible psychological torture, wanting his own people to kill him. Some who knew Abraham and had been privy to his previous trials knew Heinrich was singling out this particular man for his twisted pleasure. Many others, however, didn't know Abraham and they thought him a traitor.
For Abraham things began to cool. After a week without a single visit from Heinrich he was starting to feel the German had forgotten him. Perhaps he was tied up in some war business now the Russians or was it the Americans were approaching. In the last two days in the still of the night everyone could hear rumbles like distant thunder. This would be the guns of the Allied armies coming towards them with rescue possibly only days away. The big question was would he survive those final days?
Nine days after the clothes incident Abraham was starting to look very similar to everybody else. The clothes were of good quality but the camp quickly degraded them into no more than expensive rags, so he began to relax a little looking more like the others. This is when Heinrich appear again. He marched into the shed accompanied by four other soldiers all with submachine guns. This looked like the end.
Lighting a cigarette he very carefully held it between his fingers before drawing on it with a joyous indulgence, and to Abraham's terror Heinrich sauntered over. He wasn't looking up at the German officer. Concentration on the work in hand seemed to be the only way he could react. He was quite shocked to feel a friendly arm around his shoulder. Heinrich whispered in his ear. “They think I'm having a joke with you. They think you are giving me information. I'm going to make them think you're helping me, a German. Now laugh or die,” Heinrich said. Abraham laughed. It was very hollow.
Heinrich continued to have his arm around Abraham's shoulder. His cheek was almost touching the Jew's cheek. One of them smelt of expensive Paris aftershave and the other smelt disgusting. This didn't seem to put the officer off. He continued to stage mumble into Abraham's ear, then, much to his surprise, he reeled back in a roar of laughter saying to a startled audience, “That's really funny. I didn't know you Jews could be so amusing.”
Heinrich pointed to a man in the far corner whose name was Benjamin. Heinrich ordered the guards to take him outside and shoot him immediately. The orders were carried out with the old accountant screaming all the way through the door and out into the yard beyond. He put up a good fight. He was kicking, gouging and clawing at anything he could, fearing not death but going out without a struggle. Seconds later there was a roar of machine gun fire, then silence.
“Good man. Thank you for the information,” Heinrich said, still smiling. He then left the accounting shed to a silence that terrified Abraham. Benjamin had been one of those who understood.
The SS sergeant who had been overlooking the accountants was also summoned out of the room leaving only the prisoners. Abraham was berated by many for being an informer, a filthy quisling who was on the take. A few of the others defended Abraham knowing the Nazi's game. The sergeant was watching everything through a spy hole and he could see who was defending Abraham against the hostile reaction of several inmates. These men would be eliminated next leaving this particular Jewish man an isolated island almost certain to die at the hands of his own people.
No matter what he said he was the one in good clothes, the man who had blatantly condemned another. Some of the other accountants continued defending him. This wouldn't last, because two days later Heinrich appeared again producing much the same stage act as before, this time picking another of Abraham's allies. He wasn't shot outside the shed like the other man. No, he disappeared, until one of the others reported seeing him lying dead next to the electric fence. He'd been badly tortured to the point where he might have thrown himself on the fence to finish it. His other supporters melted away frightened of being eliminated, and now no one would protest his innocence!
Two days later he remained alive, and there were no visits from the officer to the accounting shed. There could be no possible relaxation because he knew if the Jews didn't kill him, Heinrich would! On the third day Heinrich came to him with the same act as before this time whispering the good news and of course the bad news. “The armies are only two days away at the most. I'm going to leave this dreadful camp very soon. Tomorrow, if you're still alive, I will kill you myself. I'm not going to waste ammunition. I'm going to beat you to death, very, very slowly!” He whispered all these words into Abraham's ear. After this he pointed at another unfortunate, even slapping Abraham on the shoulder saying loudly, “Good, very good!”