SHE begged me for it. You know how divinely exalted young women can become. Begged for a cyanide pill as though it were her right, as though I should be doing her out of a great spiritual experience if I hesitated. Men don’t behave like that at all. A man accepts the means of death without looking at it, hides it in his smallest pocket and examines it with loathing when he gets home or wherever is serving him as a home. No, martyrdom for us has no attraction—not, at any rate, for the more active type.
You never dreamed she had that sort of past, did you? And I would not have told you, if you hadn’t made that unjust remark about her: bright and beautiful as the vicar’s daughter in a Victorian novel. Pah!
There’s nothing artificial in her character. It’s not an attack of poise brought on by reading too many women’s magazines. Dina impresses everyone, even on first acquaintance, with her extraordinary inner happiness. It’s real, and only an unromantic mind like yours could have thought it was not. She adores her husband. Can’t see anything ordinary in him. And she is convinced that there were never such children as hers. Nothing exceptional in that, of course—except that she happens to be right. Dina is entirely without any sense of guilt; that unnecessary, unjustified sense of guilt which takes the spirit out of so many of our highly civilised women. She is in love with life and she can’t forget it.
I suppose you know that Dina is of pure Polish blood and breeding. By 1944 there was nothing left, of all she believed in, but patriotism. War and politics had made her an orphan, and the little legacy which would have taken her through the university was reduced to nothing. So when she was about to become a charge on public funds she was shipped off from Warsaw as a foreign worker, and found herself in a factory at Dusseldorf making sights for guns. The Germans are a most extraordinary people. Can you imagine any other nation filling up their country with enemies in wartime? They couldn’t believe that Europe really disliked being conquered by nice, comfortable, honest Nazis.
In Dina’s factory I was a very favoured person, working on special lenses. That’s a job which trains a man to infinite patience and readiness to accept disappointment. It married in with my real interest, which was to interfere in every way open to me—very minor ways—with the production of munitions. I was not suspected. The whole of my political past in Austria made me a very probable Nazi sympathiser. My reason for loathing Hitler and all that he stood for was simply good taste. That’s a motive quite outside the ken of policemen, and I didn’t go out of my way to explain it.
Dina was reported to me as promising material. Among so many worn, shabby, still pretty girls she was inconspicuous, but she had the advantage that even in the rain and smoke of Dusseldorf you could always spot her, if you were looking for her, a long way off. I had her watched for six months before I employed her.
I became fonder of her—in a fatherly way—than was strictly professional. She was so graceful and slight, with a corona of fair, fine curls and big brown eyes burning to shake the world, or at any rate that part of it governed by Hitler. And so very, very young. If she had been born ten years later than she was, all that emotion—well, it might have found an outlet in crazy worship of some crooner or other. As it was, she had as single a mind as a tiger cub on its first kill without the help of mother.
I had not the heart to use her for much except messages; and once or twice, when it was reasonably safe, she accidentally left a little parcel of explosives—disguised as a packet of sandwiches, for example—in contact with a machine lathe. She had little to fear from any ordinary questioning. She could readily admit that she ran innocent errands for me.
The less one knew, the better. But I had occasionally to deliver material to another organisation—a suicidal outfit of Poles, led by a Colonel Lipski who passed himself off as a sturdy blacksmith from Posen. Communication with him was difficult—we were taking our orders from different sources—and I had recourse to Dina. She could disappear into the wet, black streets and become part of the drifting smoke and drifting masses. It was quite natural for Poles to foregather. We all had so much freedom.
That’s an odd view of wartime Germany, isn’t it? But sometimes, after working hours, the streets seemed to hold more foreigners than Germans. The situation must have been a nightmare for the Gestapo. They did their best. Efficiency was impossible, so they made up for it by terror. In our factory alone they tortured and shot four men for sabotage. Two were loyal Nazis. One was their own agent. And the fourth, a very conscientious foreman. A little too conscientious. In that fog of suspicion we were remarkably successful at faking evidence against anyone who was better dead.
Still, human nature was on the Gestapo side. Their agents, sharing a street corner or a café or just a damp patch of shadow with weary foreigners, were bound to make friends. Those war slaves were simple people, straight from tenements or villages. Five per cent would betray whatever they didn’t understand for money; and twenty per cent couldn’t keep a secret without telling a neighbour. That made a full quarter whom it was lethal to trust. And into that sullen, formless mass I had to send Dina. She must have felt a little like your Victorian vicar’s daughter then.
Some such murderous rumour, something whispered and overheard in the dusk at the factory gate, enveloped Lipski and his organisation. I don’t suppose the Gestapo knew at first what would come out of the arrests. But Dina and I knew. Lipski hated too passionately. If they really went to work on him, he was likely to spit in his interrogator’s face and boast of his past and what he had done—naturally taking all the blame on himself. He was a very gallant man, but not clever. A trained Gestapo expert, with such a spirited confession to work from, could lead the blacksmith-colonel much farther along his line of contacts that he ever meant to go.
It was then that Dina came to my workshop. She had every right to be there. She was employed in the storekeeper’s office, and I used to pass my indents through her. My assistants just grinned whenever I invited her into my little private office. Not unpleasantly. The smiles merely commented on the sentiment of a middle-aged Austrian for a waif as tense as the glass on which he worked.
‘I shall be next,’ she said.
She gloried in it. Think of your own daughter in her most unaccountable and resolute mood—that was Dina! She might have determined to run away and get married. A grim bridegroom. Not to be feared if he embraced her instantaneously. But the Gestapo might ensure that the honeymoon was protracted.
It was a wonder that she had not been arrested already. Lipski was possibly unconscious for the time being.
‘Try to believe that you know nothing,’ I told her. ‘Why shouldn’t you have taken messages for me? My assistants, the foreman, the office boy—they are always trotting about the works with notes from me. I have a passion for writing notes. Forget down to the bottom of your soul that what I gave you had any more significance than what I give them!’
She refused to be put off.
‘It’s not the messages among ourselves,’ she answered. ‘I am the only person who could lead the police from Lipski to us.’
‘But you will not,’ I assured her.
‘How can you know I won’t?’ she cried. ‘How can I know? We must make sure—both of us.’
I pretended not to know what she wanted. She was so young, and death is so irrevocable.
‘You promised,’ she said.
Well, I had—to all of them who worked directly under me. Yes, I had explained to them that instant death was quite painless, reminded them that soldiers seldom had that much luck, told them that the only thing to fear was betrayal of a comrade. All very suitable. No doubt there were thousands of commanding officers handing out the same line on both sides of twenty different fronts. But that did not make it less true.
I had the pills locked up with my personal instruments, marked Aspirin. Hold one in your handkerchief, male or female, convey it to your mouth and crunch. A remedy that no one should be without, as the advertisements say. It was a pity that the establishment behind Lipski had never distributed free samples. But they were doing sabotage on a shoe-string.
Dina was bound to be questioned. Lipski would not give her away—not even spitting at them. Poles are always chivalrous. But nothing could prevent them finding out, by a process of elimination, that she was among three or four suspects who came into the story out of darkness and vanished back into darkness. And Dina, of course, could lead them to me. Not that I mattered. I had cyanide, too.
I gave her what the situation demanded, remembering—oh, that she was alive and all she wouldn’t be if she were dead.
Dina was arrested next day. She did her duty. Only eighteen she was when her teeth met in the pill. Don’t they say that all his past life revolves before a drowning man? Well, before her, in the second that was left to her, revolved all the future she might have had. The lovers, the husband, the children, the peace which somehow, some day, would bring long unimaginable years.
Less than a second, I had told her. But there was time in it for a moment of truth when the fifty or sixty years which might have been could advance her, on account, their visions of fulfilment.
Just as real, perhaps, as a glimpse of heaven to the old and pious. But she was too young. No harps or angels or Nirvana for her. Life—that was the heaven which Dina saw unfolding. Yet she crunched and she swallowed, and her heart raced so that she thought its last fluttering was on her. But still the heavy boots marched on each side of her, and she with them.
All men are much the same. My duty was to see that she died before she could talk. Theirs was to exterminate the saboteur. Yet they were quite content to question her decently for a day, and then put her in Ravensbruck Camp as a highly suspicious character against whom nothing definite could be proved. Even in Ravensbruck the commandant made a sort of pet of her. When for a few seconds you have longed to live with a passion that most of us never know in our whole existence, your joy thereafter is bound to make its mark on those around you.
And so on to this day. What we see in her is a woman whose every cell is still rejoicing because it is alive. There’s little room for hurt after a rebirth like that, and none at all for guilt. And love of husband and children is an unexpected Gift of God that goes far beyond the hackneyed phrase, even beyond her dreams of them while crunching cyanide. That is the explanation of Dina.
A miracle? No, I gave her real Aspirin, of course. There are times when the preservation of an individual is more important than any good reason of state. Isn’t that what we were fighting about?