Page 39

‘Your secretary has informed me about your condition, Captain Lindiger, and I agree with her that you shouldn’t be here.

I appreciate that you want to continue with your work, but I won’t allow it.

You could make yourself worse. If it’s typhus, which I strongly suspect it is, you could infect the rest of us.

I’m going to arrange transport to the main hospital in Munich and send you for treatment right away. ’

Pascal was still arguing as the commandant put the phone down and terminated the call.

He closed his eyes and drew a breath that broke into a coughing fit.

He suspected typhus too. His head was a scrambled mess; his shirt was plastered with sweat.

His back felt as if a mule had kicked it.

The livid red rash which had appeared on his chest that morning had drained the colour from his face.

He was hardly surprised that his secretary had taken one look at him and fled.

He also knew he urgently needed medical help, but there wasn’t time to take it.

He couldn’t leave, not with the end so close and so much left to do.

He wiped his eyes and groped for a pen and paper, intending to make a list of the men he needed to speak to and save, until a thankfully lucid moment stopped him.

The war might have entered its dying days, but that didn’t mean the killing was done with at Dachau, of inmates or traitors.

Any list he wrote would have sent them all to the shooting gallery.

The irony of the situation – that he was now determined to stay alive and stay in the camp – wasn’t lost on him, despite his severely weakened state.

Himmler has ordered the dismantling of the gas chambers at Auschwitz. Prepare for further orders to follow.

As soon as that memo had arrived on Pascal’s desk at the end of October 1944, he’d seen it for what it was. The destruction of evidence; the concealing of guilt. The last panicked gasps of a monstrous regime. When the further orders came in, they confirmed it.

All bodies which have been buried at Dachau and in the woods surrounding it are to be exhumed and burned without delay.

A shortage of coal had temporarily closed the crematorium which dealt with the rising death toll, but that was soon rectified.

Now the ovens were churning day and night, and the forests had grown a carpet of ash.

And February had brought a new influx of site-specific commands, which all began with prepare .

Prepare the camp for a new influx of prisoners. Prepare the guards for greatly increased numbers who must not be allowed to threaten discipline. Prepare evacuation plans in the form of a march that can be actioned at speed.

The Russians had discovered Auschwitz and its heart-stopping cargo of human misery at the end of January.

They’d shared its horrors with the world.

They’d fuelled the soldiers closing in on Germany from all sides with a new reason to hate the people they were about to conquer.

And whatever Hitler had told those threatened people to believe, their enemies were unstoppable.

The Allies had crossed the Belgian border and taken Aachen; they had a foothold on German soil.

They’d reached Strasbourg, which was less than three days’ march away from Dachau.

The Russians controlled most of Poland; they were advancing towards Austria as well as Berlin.

The war was about to burst across Germany’s borders and swallow it.

More killing camps and more crimes against humanity were about be uncovered.

But if Hitler had his way, more evidence – dead or alive – would be destroyed first. Which was exactly what Pascal, regardless of how ill he was or how many or how few inmates his efforts could save, had been determined to warn them about and stop.

‘Germany is going to lose; it’s inevitable, but Hitler won’t accept it.

He’s demanding that last stands be made all across the country, so there’s no guarantee the end will come quickly.

In the meantime, more prisoners are going to be brought in here from the camps closest to the front lines.

I don’t have access to the exact date for those transfers yet, or to the numbers involved, but Dachau is already stretched to breaking point, and any new influx threatens chaos. ’

Pascal paused. This could be the last clandestine meeting he was able to convene, and he needed the men hanging on his words to understand how even more fragile their existence was about to become, without stripping them of all hope that they’d survive.

He wasn’t sure if those two things were possible.

And none of them had the time to waste on false promises.

‘To put it bluntly, what’s coming is worse than everything that’s come before.

The prisoners who arrive here will be starving and likely sick, and they’ll have been marched beyond their endurance.

There won’t be enough rations to sustain them – or you.

Or any way to prevent a mass epidemic breaking out if they bring typhus or dysentery with them, which we have to assume they will.

And Dachau will only be a temporary stop; there’ll be a clear-out here too.

When the end does come, the Nazis’ one concern will be their survival. Which your survival threatens.’

‘You’re a little ray of sunshine, aren’t you?

’ Leon – who’d been one of the first inmates to decide Pascal was worth trusting, and could have been aged anywhere from twenty to sixty, his face was so devoid of fat – managed a smile which stretched his cracked lips.

‘But you don’t need to spell it out. We’re evidence – we know that.

They’ll kill us here, or they’ll march us out and kill us on the road, like they’re doing with the rest. The question is, what can we do about it? ’

‘Get ahead of them.’

Pascal glanced round the small group of men who’d become his lieutenants.

So many more lives depended on their actions and their trust in him than the men he’d spoken directly to himself.

And any one of the increasingly desperate inmates waiting in the wings could betray his plans and his accomplices for the promise of a freedom they’d never actually see.

Which has been the case since the first day I smuggled medicine in here and positioned myself as the ‘good one’. No one betrayed me then; no one’s betrayed us since. That’s the best any of us can hope for.

His reply was greeted by a chorus of, ‘What on earth do you mean?’ that he could only partially answer.

‘You need to do what the guards have been told to do and prepare yourself. Keep away from the new prisoners as much as you can. Find, or dig out, or build hiding places wherever they won’t be found – underground, in the workshop stores or attics, in the barrack roofs if you can manage it.

I’ll help, I’ll get you some tools, although you’ll have to fashion most of what you need yourselves.

If there’s a chance to create a diversion to cover what you’re doing, I’ll take it.

The main thing to do is to get started. Once the camp gets crowded, there’ll be far fewer sweeps of it, which should help. ’

He stopped again, waiting for the questions or concerns which would have been justified, but nobody spoke.

‘It’s a lot to take in, I know, and none of this will be easy to do. The only other advice I’ve got for you is to hold your nerve. Timing will be everything. You won’t be able to disappear into hiding until the Allies are almost upon us, or roll calls have been abandoned, which might come first.’

‘But if the roll calls continue, of the old sections at least, how will we know when the right time is? How do we avoid alerting the guards or getting swept up in a purge?’

The silence in the barracks hung so thick, Leon’s whisper sounded twice as loud as it should have done, and everyone glanced nervously round. Leon wasn’t trying to smile anymore. The years had dropped from his eyes if not his face, and he looked young and afraid.

Pascal had only one answer for him. ‘Because you can trust me – you know you can.’

Whatever else Pascal was worried about, it wasn’t Leon’s lack of faith in him.

The box of Prontosil tablets Pascal had handed the dumbstruck inmate what felt like a lifetime ago had saved half a dozen lives.

The bond that had created between them, and Leon’s courage in persuading the other men – who’d watched guards like Rohmer torment the prisoners for pleasure and had no reason to trust anyone – that Pascal wasn’t playing tricks, had never faltered.

There was no reason for it to break now.

‘And I’ll be here until this ends; I’ll send you a signal. I won’t let you down.’

Leon didn’t move for a moment, then he reached out his hand for Pascal’s.

The room breathed again as their handclasp turned into an embrace, and the men – who’d been shorn of everything that had made them feel like men on the day they were herded through the gates – were offered a new glimpse of life.

Which will crumble to dust if I’m not here like I promised. If there’s no warning. So I can’t leave, whatever the commandant says, not until I know they’ll be safe.

Unfortunately, Pascal’s body was no longer listening to his fever-soaked brain.

The desk lost its solid edges. He tried to stand up and didn’t know if he had made it to his feet.

His last thought was a muddle of directions which involved him running to the barracks and saving someone, anyone, by swapping places with them.

I’m here. You can go. Put on my uniform and leave by the main gate.

A rumbling roared through his head, picking up speed like the train he could suddenly see racing towards him.

‘We’ve made it this far – that’s something to celebrate.’

There was a prisoner standing on the platform, waving at him and hurrying him on.

No, not a prisoner, a pretty girl who he knew, who needed his help.

Pascal held out his jacket towards her waiting hands, but her face kept shifting and melting, and he couldn’t get close to her or remember her name – the letters it was made from kept dancing away from his tongue.

‘N. There’s an N in it, isn’t there?’

Pascal thought the girl smiled as he spoke to her.

He thought he saw an ice-capped mountain towering behind her and a snowflake falling onto her hair.

She came closer. He could smell wildflowers on her skin; he could feel his lips tingling.

But then his mind went blank and the typhoid fever which had him in its grip and was already sweeping its way through Leon’s barracks and too many of the carefully concealed hiding places dropped him in an unconscious heap to the floor.