A Man Without Breath Read Free Page B

them brought by the women outside – filled another room where they had been tossed, but no one was complaining. Things were quiet. After almost a decade of Nazi rule Jews knew better than to complain. It was only the police sergeant in charge of these people who seemed inclined to bemoan his lot, and as he searched a clipboard for Franz Meyer’s name and then led me to the second-floor office where the manwas being held, he began to unroll the barbed S-wire of his sharp complaint:
    ‘I don’t know what I’m supposed to do with all these people. No one’s told me a damn thing. How long they’re going to be here. How to make them comfortable. How to answer all of these bloody women who are demanding answers. It’s not so easy, I can tell you. All I’ve got is what was in this office building when we turned up yesterday. Toilet paper ran out within an hour of us being here. And Christ only knows how I’m going to feed them. There’s nothing open on a Sunday.’
    ‘Why don’t you open those food parcels and give them that?’ I asked.
    The sergeant looked incredulous. ‘I couldn’t do that,’ he said. ‘Those are private parcels.’
    ‘I shouldn’t think that the people they belong to will mind,’ I said. ‘Just as long as they get something to eat.’
    We found Franz Meyer seated in one of the larger offices where almost a hundred men were waiting patiently for something to happen. The sergeant called Meyer out and, still grumbling, went off to think about what I’d suggested about the parcels, while I spoke to my potential war-crimes witness in the comparative privacy of the corridor.
    I told him that I worked for the War Crimes Bureau and why I was there. Meanwhile, outside the building, the women’s protest seemed to be getting louder.
    ‘Your wife and sisters-in-law are outside,’ I told him. ‘It’s them who put me up to this.’
    ‘Please tell them to go home,’ said Meyer. ‘It’s safer in here than out there, I think.’
    ‘I agree. But they’re not about to listen to me.’
    Meyer grinned. ‘Yes, I can imagine.’
    ‘The sooner you tell me about what happened on the SS
Hrotsvitha von Gandersheim
, the sooner I can speak to my boss and see about getting you out of here, and the sooner we can get them all out of harm’s way.’ I paused. ‘That is if you’re prepared to give me a deposition.’
    ‘It’s my only chance of avoiding a concentration camp, I think.’
    ‘Or worse,’ I added, by way of extra incentive.
    ‘Well, that’s honest, I suppose.’ He shrugged.
    ‘I’ll take that as a yes, shall I?’
    He nodded and we spent the next thirty minutes writing out his statement about what had happened off the coast of Norway in August 1941. When he’d signed it, I wagged my finger at him.
    ‘Coming here like this I’m sticking my neck out for you,’ I told him. ‘So you’d better not let me down. If I so much as get a whiff of you changing your story I’ll wash my hands of you. Got that?’
    He nodded. ‘So why are you sticking your neck out?’
    It was a good question and probably it deserved an answer, but I hardly wanted to go into how a friend of a friend had asked me to help, which is how these things usually got fixed in Germany; and I certainly didn’t want to mention how attractive I found his sister-in-law Klara, or that I was making up for some lost time when it came to helping Jews; and maybe a bit more than only lost time.
    ‘Let’s just say I don’t like the Tommies very much and leave it at that, shall we?’ I shook my head. ‘Besides, I’m not promising anything. It’s up to my boss, Judge Goldsche. If he thinks your deposition can start an inquiry into a British war crime, he’s the one who’ll have to persuade the Foreign Office that this is worth a white book, not me.’
    ‘What’s a white book?’
    ‘An official publication that’s intended to present the German side of an incident that might amount to a violation of the laws of war.