THE NEW YEAR was approaching but no one in the valley felt much like celebrating it. The change from one year to the next was a time to take stock and to look forward, but Brandt had the sense that people wanted the calendar to stop still at the end of nineteen forty-four, for the future to remain unknown and for the past to remain hidden. But that was impossible – the days marched on. Their fate, whatever it was to be, advanced a little closer.
The mood in the village had been grim in the week that followed the Red Farm shoot – it was an unwelcome reminder of how close the mining camp was and how many had some connection with it. Then a man was hanged in the town at the bottom of the valley for saying the war was lost, alongside two partisans and a black-market profiteer, and that had made things even worse. His father had sighed and said things must be getting really bad if they were hanging the black marketeers.
At night in the dark village – the blackouts were even more frequent now – the lightless houses were anything but silent. From behind the closed wooden shutters there came the sounds of hammering and sawing and urgent conversation. The smallest noise carried clearly in the still air. Bags were being packed, harness repaired, horses reshod and cabins built on carts to give protection on a long winter journey.
The fear wasn’t limited to the Germans of the valley. The foreign workers and prisoners of war who worked for its farms and businesses all shared in the sense of foreboding. No one felt confident about the future. They lived in limbo, with a sense that each time the clock ticked it brought this halfway life one second closer to its end. The grim sense of an imminent conclusion seemed to reach up into the very sky itself – grey clouds moved towards the western hills slowly and relentlessly.
And it was cold – bitterly and utterly cold.
Brandt was busy. There were things that needed to be done – done urgently – and it didn’t help that the Volkssturm had been placed on higher alert. They now had to mount a guard on the valley road as well as the village bridge. Some of the men slept in the village hall rather than go home to their farms, only to turn round in the morning and come back again. Prisoners from the mining camp were brought down the valley to dig more defences. They left four of their number buried in one of the trenches they dug.
Two ancient machine guns with Czech markings arrived at the village hall with a supply of ammunition that looked even older. And then Wehrmacht engineers appeared and filled the corridor that ran inside the dam from one side to the other with crates of explosive.
The regional Party boss must have been concerned about morale because, two days before the New Year, all the local Volkssturm units were summoned to a rally in the town at the bottom of the valley. If anyone had asked Brandt he could have told them not to show the newsreel – but no one did. Brandt and the rest of the Volkssturm marched down from the village and sat in their allocated seats, numb with cold from the journey and then with shock, as black and white atrocities flickered across the screen. The narrator explained in detail what the Soviets had done to the population of the small East Prussian village – no horror was left undocumented, no image was too graphic.
But the thing was, Nemmersdorf wasn’t so different from their village – the dead could have been their people; the houses, their houses. Brandt looked along the row and saw the emptiness and resignation in the older men’s pale faces. Afterwards some young fellow, younger than Brandt, anyway, wearing round glasses and a swastika armband over his leather coat, his dark hair slicked back, took to the stage. He spoke about wonder weapons and the necessity for faith in the all-seeing wisdom of the Führer. He told them the current situation was a test of the German people’s will, but that they would emerge triumphant. There was no applause when the speech finished.
The snow whirled down around them as they marched back up the valley. He exchanged a glance with Uncle Ernst on several occasions – they didn’t need words. And then, when they were nearly back at the village and the blizzard was at its worst, a figure appeared, almost right beside them. No one else noticed the man. His face was obscured by the brim of his trilby, pulled low, and a scarf – but, for an instant, his eyes met Brandt’s and they recognized each other.
It was Hubert.