SEVERAL HUNDRED years previously, a bridge had been built ahead of them, where the river was calmed by a wide bend in its course. Not long after the bridge had been built, a church had followed and, as the valley here was broad and fertile, a village had grown around it, building by building. Fields had been cleared on the gentle slopes that rose and farm buildings scattered on both sides of the river – right up to the tree line.
The bridge’s arches still marched across the river’s width but the dam – built further up the valley where it narrowed once again – now carried most of the traffic that would otherwise have come this way. The church’s spire still dominated the village’s few streets and alleyways and, as they approached, its bell rang out twice, as if in greeting. There were some new houses on the outskirts and some of the older buildings had been re-roofed and spruced up while others had tumbled still further into disrepair. It was even sleepier than Brandt remembered it.
The road took them along the main street, where the butcher’s and the bakery still stood, past the police station and the small village hall, then through the church square to the higher valley beyond. The only people they passed were two youngsters in brown shirts and shorts, talking underneath the square’s oak tree. The red scarves at their necks marked them out as Hitler Youth. Apart from the boys, who paid them no attention, they saw no one.
‘It seems empty without—’ Brandt began, but his father interrupted him by raising a hand – nodding in greeting to an older man approaching them along the valley road. It was neatly done. Brandt didn’t recognize the man but he returned Brandt’s gaze intently, his grey eyes bright in a face dark from the summer sun. They strayed to Brandt’s empty sleeve before turning their attention to Brandt’s father, nodding in response to his raised hand.
When they were alone on the road that led away from the village, his father finally spoke.
‘That was Brunner. A Volksdeutsch from the Ukraine. A Party member.’
Brandt understood.
‘I don’t come into the village much these days,’ his father continued, as if Brunner might be the explanation. ‘Monika goes instead, mostly. It’s good for her to get out away from the farm – even to here.’
His father was waiting for him to ask a question.
‘What happened to Hubert?’
His father sighed.
‘He was here for a while – I took him on, of course. He could have stayed and been safe – at least safer than he would have been anywhere else – but then one day he was gone. I didn’t ask where he went because it’s better that way. But not too far away, I don’t think. Perhaps Monika doesn’t stay here just to keep me company.’ Brandt wondered about his sister, spending her youth in the valley – isolated, by virtue of being German, from much of the terror and loss that surrounded her. Her staying seemed a sensible choice to him. But as for Hubert?
Brandt thought back to the watchers in the forest and wondered if Hubert had been one of them.
The road turned once again, climbing as the valley closed in, trees coming down the slope to run alongside it, so that the buggy travelled in their shade. To their right, far below, he could see the remnants of the old road, built before the dam and made redundant by it. Ahead of them, the dam itself spread across the narrow gap, its buttresses, containing the turbines, spewing water down into a pool from where the new river flowed. The old river, when it had been in the mood, had regularly burst its banks further down its course, inundating the town and flooding the plain. The dam had tamed it, and widened the lake that had always run along the centre of the valley to form a reservoir. Now the dam’s turbines powered the factories in the town from which they had just come.
On this side of the dam, the eastern side, men were working with spades and picks, digging out wide and deep trenches on either side of the road that led across the barrier’s length. They piled the earth that they were excavating onto the higher side, the water side, creating large banks in front of which the deep ditches ran – ten metres or so in width. Tank traps.
The dam was being fortified. Tumbles of barbed wire ran across the approaches and behind the tank traps. Higher so it would dominate the approaches to the dam, Brandt could see a bunker being built into the side of the slope and, on either side of the road, a zig-zag trench. Someone, somewhere, was expecting the Russians to roll into this valley in the near future. He glanced across at his father, who shrugged his shoulders.
‘After all that’s happened over the last few years, a price will have to be paid.’
Brandt thought about replying – but what could he say? After all, even if none of this had been their fault – even if they’d done their best – it had been done in their name. And, of course, in Brandt’s case, he’d fought in the east – and no one who had fought in Russia could wash their hands of what had happened there.
The dam behind them, the road ran alongside the reservoir, wide and twinkling blue in the sunlight. He considered asking his father to stop for a moment. Perhaps he could cool his feet in its water. But he remembered Monika waiting at home for him and quashed the thought.
There were more young men working in the fields here – some of them wearing worn-out military uniforms. Some were French and British but he heard other accents and languages as well. He saw no Russian prisoners of war but they must be here somewhere. They couldn’t all have been murdered.
They turned off the main road, towards the farm. So strong was the sense of home now that it was as if he recognized each rock, each tree and each fence post. He saw thin, dark men in prison pyjamas cutting hay, a guard watching over them – his rifle at the ready. His father answered his unvoiced question.
‘There’s another work camp at the far end of the valley, to serve the mine. Most of them work in the mine, of course, but some are sent out to the fields if the farmer pays them enough. Not to our farm, I can promise you that.’
The buggy’s traces were wrapped around the older man’s fists, and when he said the word ‘them’, he pointed towards a new building, one that Brandt didn’t remember, that stood up from the road ahead. It was long and low, more than fifty metres from one end to the other, its wooden walls still crisp with new whitewash. The grassy slope that led down to the road in front of the building was carefully tended – if it weren’t for the high barbed-wire fence and deep protective ditch that surrounded it, you might have thought the place was a hotel. Before the war, there had been a military fortification in the same spot, built by the Polish army to defend the dam from the Germans. At first he couldn’t see it, but it was still there, partially obscured by a manicured hedge – useless now that the threat was coming from the opposite direction. In front of the hut, on a tall whitewashed pole, an SS flag flew.
‘What are they doing here?’
Brandt looked at the building with fresh eyes. Its rustic decoration, the terrace that ran the entire length of the side of the building that overlooked the reservoir, the wooden-tiled roof – all seemed now to have a more sinister aspect to them. And then there was the wire. And the guardhouse.
‘It’s a rest hut,’ his father answered.
But Brandt wasn’t listening – he was watching a woman walk down the slope of the hut’s lawn, a rake held in her hands. She was thin, painfully so, and the grubby pyjamas she wore were several sizes too large for her, the black vertical stripes like prison bars she could carry around with her. Above her left breast a thin strip of white fabric had been sewn then marked with a hand-drawn red triangle and a number. The woman’s hair was little more than fuzz but it might have been blonde, originally. It was too short to be able to tell for certain.
‘It’s best not to look too closely. They don’t take kindly to it.’
An SS man sat on a low wall, further up the hill, his rifle beside him and the top buttons of his tunic undone. He was more interested in the view than Brandt and his father – or indeed the women who were working in the garden. There were six women in total, two with a red triangle on their prison pyjamas, two with a dark blue triangle and two with a yellow star. He had no idea what the triangles indicated, but he knew what the yellow star meant.
The strange thing was that the woman he’d noticed first was familiar to him for some reason.
‘What did you say this place was?’ Brandt asked, keeping his voice low.
‘It’s for the SS.’
His father didn’t look at him or the building, instead keeping his eyes on the road ahead.
‘You said it was a rest hut.’
‘I told you there was a place near here. A camp.’
‘I see,’ Brandt said, and found himself turning to spit. It landed black and wet on the pale dust of the road. He looked back up towards the hut, and found that something about his action had caught her attention.
Their eyes met for an instant but the brief glance felt like a slap. It was as though the world had closed in around him and, for an instant, he was at one end of a tunnel and she at the other. Brandt found that his fingers were digging into the wooden bench. He could feel splinters cutting in under his nails.
He must have made a noise because his father looked over to him, concerned.
‘Are you all right?’
‘I’m fine,’ he said, struggling to find the breath to speak. ‘Sometimes there’s pain.’
‘I’ll look at you when we get home. Do you want to stop for a moment?’
The lane that led to their farm was only a few hundred metres further along. He risked a glance over towards the woman but she had turned away. Brandt shook his head.
‘No. Let’s carry on.’
He was conscious that his words had been growled rather than spoken. It couldn’t be her. If it was – wouldn’t she be wearing a yellow star?
He took one last look up at the hut. She was raking the grass now, her back to the road. There was something about the way she held herself, even after all these years that removed all doubt.
‘Paul?’
‘Yes?’
‘What are you going to do, now that you’re back here?’
Brandt swallowed.
‘I plan to make amends,’ he said. ‘For all of my sins.’