Jogging slowly, a cumbersome, stabbing jog, shoulders twisting in to blade and bone. Turning up Sheepcote Lane. Struck by the rich whiff of ripe, mouldering manure and flaky straw from the stables. Never fails to bring back memories of those wheat and potato farms on the Polish uplands, the corn poppies and crocuses, the wooden churches . . . Past cottages of knapped flint and fig-trees by lych-gates and banks of nettles, cow-parsley and mauve birdseye. Horse-shoe ruts and clods of dung. Along the flint-silted path. The poignant fluting of a distant cuckoo.
Shuffling up through a tunnel of ivydored trees, flint cobbles gradually fracturing into pocks of chalk. Shadows festooned with bosky lattice-work. Now ungainly side-stepping, puffing, striving for the ridge of the Downs. Where the lime-green swell of whispering wheat shimmers down to a copse of rookeries. Stop for a breather and embrace the limitless space, the changing perspectives, the physical solitude. Deep, deep breaths. Just longing to rush and swish among the firming stems, paddling fingers through wispy beards.
Drawing breath a shade more easily, but shunting like a slow goods train, along the upland track of yellow-flowered gorse open to the seaward plain. Whale-backed fields blue-hazed in the balm of spring. Highdown Hill, the Iron Age fort and Saxon cemetery, rises like an armour-plated breast, sprouting a windbreak of trees. The blue-rinsed sea appears becalmed, three miles distant. Imagine the biting iodine smell from long, slithery strops and bladders of seaweed lying dishevelled on the stony beach or dried-out in straggly, dark clots buzzed by flies.
Gathering pace as the track dips into a combe of oaks and elms, debouching onto a breeze-fanned knoll. On the eastern horizon, the beeches of Chanctonbury Ring cluster in dark conspiracy, threatening to march down into the valley and up these arable slopes. Then jogging over chalky nuggets of milk-coffee soil, the ruts and furrows and heavy tread . . .
Tanks! Caterpillar wheels thrust up, surging down, rumbling on and on, gun-turrets swivelling like a human snout on the scent. Frantically scooping out earth, potato plants to cover his body. Steeling against soil that sundered that heaved. Grinding wheels clawing towards nearer his head to crush nearer his legs nearer holding breath till burst till thunder monsters grumble clanking by, scourging the hillocks with grunt and grinding ease. Lying in a grave sucking for air through dirt, sucking hard. Lucky, lucky, so damned lucky! Why me, you miserable, worthless, despicable creature! He’d only got lockjaw when oh how he ached to spit, the rattle in his throat, shakes, a wet crotch, a dribbly wet trouser leg. Der Untermensch!
It’s okay, it’s okay. No plumes of nauseous black smoke scarring the vaporous skyline. Look there! Over by the barn. Only the same old dull red Massey Ferguson that patiently tenders the swell and lilt of these upland fields. Would the fear, the horror, the long, dark night of the soul never end? The wounds never heal?
Wheeling left to follow the northern scarp, overlooking the swathes of mown grass and the Chichester Road with its ruin of an old toll-gate that curves round the foot of the Downs as breathtakingly as any palm-deco Mediterranean bay, its beetling cars like driverless Dinky Toys stately with silence. Past Friesians with numbered rumps, then winding into a woodland of luxuriant undergrowth and verdigris bark, like an iridescent, picture-book haunt where no humans penetrate, but eyes, noses, mouths transfigure the trunks and squirrels whisper and owls keep their own counsel.
Yet you smile. Inwardly, of course. Bitterly. You know that fairy-tale nonsense has died, blown to smithereens. Now you see, buried in the walls of the chalk-pits, the gnarled and nobbled visages of those lost generations, thousands upon thousands of them whose wretched, greyish or white faces swim before your eyes, as if bundled along towards the camps . . . inexorably.
Remember where you are, for God’s sake! It is May, England. Expanding all around a stalky carpet of bluebells, nodding in subdued hues of pale blue to a slight tint of purple with bold green leaves. And what rich humus! A scratching, brown pheasant squawks and bobs into darker brush, rustling.
Huh, food! Belly always aching in the forest, from starvation, a sense of utter deprivation, a hollow man in more ways than one. And the dysentery. Those cravings for salted herring, sauerkraut and pumpernickel bread and oh for a shot of vodka to warm the cockles. Instead, rooted-out stew, perhaps summer bilberries that you shat out minutes later. But there was nothing under five months’ driving snow except brackish water frozen and corpses stiff as boards, when spindly pine trees begrudged shelter. Thank God for that tarpaulin lean-to – what a steal! – but even then his hair grew white with frost and fear and fingers became icicles of searing pain. Thawed out by the occasional peat fire, but staying alert for other fugitives, if creeping apathy allowed. Like Red Army prisoners-of-war. Those shitheads would promise carbines in return for money and jewelry, but they snatched your bundle of zloty and fled into the shadows. Or they lay in wait to pounce on one of our meydlekh. Couldn’t trust those rapists. Or even the sullen local peasants, who’d betray you soon as look at you. Then the December hunts by Wehrmacht pigs and their tracker dogs. Into the swamps. The icy chill, those hot-cold fevers, shivering and shaking till your teeth rattled loose. Waiting and waiting for the Red Army relief.
To be honest, I did all right for grub in the Camp. I was treated special. Even had two showers a day. There was a shower room with tiles. The SS weren’t permitted to touch the bodies.
Run harder, deeper into the netherworld. As if getting drunk on greenness, baize on emerald, lime against the bottle green of the heart of the wood at twilight. Thank you, God, for green sward, hawthorn hedges, the sweep of grassy downs . . .
Suddenly arrested by an urge to roll like a puppy in this opalescent enchantment. Cutting off the track and ducking through a tangle of branches until safely out of eyeshot. Tearing off runners and socks, still nervously looking round. No, don’t think about undressing rooms here. Memory is a vicious place.
Ah, that’s better, much better. A delectable, succulent dampness easing bare feet. Whipping off singlet and shorts and pants. Draping them over a mossy stump. Simple uncomplicated things, like the sound of silence gently ruffled by the warm breeze.
Stooping to frisk armfuls of flower bells against the stubbiness of your legs. Then wrenching out a bunch of firm, sappy stems, which yield a little sigh from their circle of humus. Sink your hands deep, deep into the rich, clean soil. Beneath the chittering of loftier boughs, you tenderly beat your body with a swatch of stems, beginning with legs itching with gossamer threads, midges, gnats, sweat until the white roots film skin with mash.
See? You don’t need to feel shame, disgust, humiliation. You mustn’t. But how can you forget those scrawny bodies, chests hollowed out like chicken carcasses, stick-thin limbs, sunken, dead stares? You must try to forget. You can’t forget.
Come on, concentrate. Keep swishing thighs, abdomen, chest, reaching over to tingle the stiffness of bunched shoulders. Underfoot, the crisp scrunch of priapic stems is delicious. Tiny shreds stick to your flesh. Embrace, embracing such pliant fibres –
Your ears prick up like a jack rabbit’s glimpsed through barbed wire. A faint grumbling growing louder. Louder. From where? To where?
Planes! Flying low, black crosses under wings, droning deafening, dropping thousand–pounders, flattening tenements into anthills. Choking with dust, black smoke as if lungs would explode before pushing mightily, feebly against the rubble. At last, freed a hand to prise out a scrap of gauze, piss on it and place the sodden cloth over nose to breathe. Then another blitzkrieg and another. Every forty-five minutes. In between raids the interminable deathly silence that anticipated a burst of mortar. Or personal black-out.
Not waiting for the red tractor and farmer armed with shotgun suspecting poachers hunting his pheasants, but throwing on your gear. Now the alluvial track is boggy with spring rains, so squish and slither along the rim, close to barbed, burgeoning brambles. Remember the juice and stain and squelch of nubsy blackberries - yes but how quick the furry mould sets in.
A whinnying of horses . . .
Horsemeat, dog, cat, grain made into gruel by means of a truck’s back axle; too rarely a gargle of red wine discovered in a deserted basement. No bread, no vegetables. Only lice and leeches in plentiful supply. One glass of clear water more precious than an ounce of gold.
You reach a cross-path marking the start of a jerry-built road of gravel and flintstone. Wasn’t it hereabouts that German prisoners of war were based, building those prefabs? A mob of one hundred or so sheep being driven, fleeces like mopheads, black-faced with Teutonic mask, black-legged . . .
Night raid in the forest. The revolt was our last chance. For the fortunate few. Those of us who missed the perimeter mines. And the SS Lugers. Charcoal and mud rubbed on faces, necks, hands, to seize dumping cache for rifles, ammunition, grenades if possible. Every one of us Jews desperate, haggard with what we’d done, every look unnerved by tics, not skinny as a rake either, not our squad anyway; a number branded on our arm, agued with sores, shoes plaided with reeds, charging with staves and catapults. Having to pulp a Kraut’s head like a coconut, working up anger and hate with a final roar from hell to do the damned deed. Then try to remember the scent of wild roses in spring, but fail. Before the charred faces of brothers Isaac and Samuel and little Eva slipped by stealth into your vision . . . But the stench of cremated bodies would always fill your snotty nostrils.
Close-to, bleating rising to a mocking din, a tinny deafening, like souls moaning in purgatory.
There were a couple of hundred of them, elders, cripples, mentally ill, like innocent animals before the blade, necks stretching. Caught the fetid stink of the final ignominy inside the lorry, exhaust fumes laying them low. Forever. Or Jewish kiddies seized and flung into a cesspit to die of suffocation, fear, agony under the weight of even more shrunken bodies flung on top of them.
Past Keeper’s Cottage, with its trellises of climbing pink roses and thatch-hooded eaves of martins flitting.
The Kommandant’s villa, Plantage, Kommandantur, Baraken, the Genickschiestand, where thugs of the SS gloated over the heap of striped, broken-necked corpses and the body clinging to the electrified fence, still putrefying.
Free-wheeling down the sealed road towards Holly Farm. A grey rat darts from cover and scampers across into the ditch, where squat water pipes lie among the nettles.
Wading, crawling through sewers in single file, struggling to keep head, pistol, arm above the effluent. One bullet, one German! White over red armbands. Stench unbearable, all-pervasive, as if diarrhea were the stuff of life. Candles guttering. Air, must have fresh air! Open the manhole cover! No! No! No! Listen to the stamp of cleated boots above! Shrill, piercing cries of child cradled by staggering, moaning mother. Kill that kid or Krauts will hear. Mother hysterical. The A.K. muttered curses but merely crawled on through the sludge. Muted sounds of gurgling sewage. Jerky rhythms of terrified breathing. And that stench, the almighty stench. The whole world was sunk in corruption.
Across the hedgerows and splashes of poppy sprawls the town tip. Pyramids of earth, mounds of junk, wrecks of rusty cars and ploughshares, cardboard coffins. Which in winter dusted with frost, occasionally snow, strikes like a communal grave.
Old Town, ’44. Bowels of tenements where civilians and wounded hid, blocked by rubble, by fire, by dust. Walls warm as ovens so you could no longer lick the moisture. Wounded groaning on grimy mattresses on floors, in passage-ways. A baggy-eyed, tight-lipped young medic bent over a messenger girl. Flashlight in hand. And handsaw. To amputate a leg. She was a mere fifteen. Or thirteen? She had crawled under German fire to a garden to pick flowers for the maimed. They were national heroes, she whispered. Once-beautiful gold braids stiffened with blood and dirt. No anaesthetic. She screamed and screamed. Till consciousness faded. Shells were bursting near the basement. Walls trembled and shook. Then one deafening blast and quake and overwhelming rush of air. The flickering light of the candle died. The medic’s flashlight barely visible through the pall of dust. Head always bowed, he continued to saw.
Oh, God, every day and oftentimes through every night, you wonder why you did it. And why did God? It wasn’t the alcohol given us to get the job done or other little privileges, like playing football with the guards, or the opportunity at huge risk of immediate death, no questions asked, of nicking from the baggage of new arrivals.
No, I certainly didn’t volunteer. I was one of the chosen nabbed at the arrival platform. I was young, chubby-faced, I s’pose, so at least looked physically capable. For the . . .er Sonderkommandos. Well, what would you do? Get shot in the head right there?
Picked out for Special Squad, yes, but always under sentence of death, remember. I would soon know too much.
The toughest thing . . . the really hard thing . . . was to lead or cajole the victims to the showers, without showing the slightest agitation. Otherwise I’d be joining them. You had to allay their anxiety and your own. If you didn’t, there’d be more blood spilt than necessary and the number of dead would amount to the same anyhow. I’ll never forget . . . choking then too, I was . . . they were still singing ‘Hatikva’ as they approached the chamber of death . . . ‘Our hope will not be lost . . . The hope of two thousand years’ . . . Yet where is mine, my faith even?
Running hard downhill . . . to block out that scream, the dolour of our anthem, my apparent indifference and collusion. With other memories.
Row upon row of corpses in shallow graves around public squares, a cross of sticks in their hands, a towel or snippet of uniform over their faces, identification papers in a sealed bottle.
Hard on your heels, almost out of control, pain stabbing your side, growing pain. Down, down toward the distant sea. Running faster for more pain and more, blood pumping, arms flailing, charging bloody mad. Like the frantic zombies we were, jumping to it, knee-jerking to shouted orders, no, not to orders; brutal thwacks on the skull, the back, the arse, anywhere to make us work faster, specially when the transport trains banked up, lugging and shoving all those naked bodies, those poor twisted blighters, as we slithered in the rain, in the mud or their own blood and excrement. To the ovens. Or the pits.
Running hard for the burning pain, always running, as if through a sucking swamp, treading bilge, shrouded in thick fog that for a brief moment clears, then clamps down with the force of nightmare. Running, running . . . nowhere.
Michael Small
May, 1984
published The Melbourne Chronicle, 1985
Her Natural Life and Other Stories, Tamarillo Publishing, 1988
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