Adam’s eyelids fluttered open and quickly closed, speared by the light. A few moments later he opened his eyes again, more carefully this time. He heard himself groan. As a schoolboy, he had been fascinated by an illustration in his physics textbook in which two horses strained in opposite directions in a futile effort to pull apart massive metal domes that had formed a vacuum. As he floated in and out of consciousness, it seemed to him that in some incomprehensible way he had become a vacuum and his body was being pulled apart.
Something was restraining him, preventing him from turning his head, but by swivelling his eyes sideways he could see a window criss-crossed by leadlights, its diamond-shaped panes glistening with a tracery of ice.
So he was still alive. He must have been captured by the Germans, yet this room didn’t look like a prisoner-of-war camp. Perhaps it was a fortress like Colditz, where they’d imprisoned the AK leaders after the Uprising, although he couldn’t imagine they had been accommodated in individual rooms. He tried to raise his head but his neck was restricted by a brace, while his right leg was attached to a pulley.
He closed his eyes. When he opened them again, someone was standing by the bed, holding a glass of water.
‘Ah, you are awake at last. Take this.’
The woman holding out two large white tablets had wiry grey hair cut very short, and a brisk manner to match. Her apron had a bib over her chest, and her laced-up black shoes made no sound as she walked towards the window.
‘Where am I?’ he asked.
‘Schaffenburg Castle.’ She walked over to the window and ran a cloth over the misted panes.
‘I’d like to see the person in charge,’ he said.
‘You’re seeing her now.’ The woman’s mouth twitched in amusement. ‘I’m Baroness Maria von Schaffenburg. The castle has been in my family for generations. But you will rest now, ja?’ She walked out of the room, leaving him tormented by a hundred unanswered questions.
His mind became a whirlpool that threatened to suck him in as he tried to remember what had happened. There was the crumping sound of the flak and the sudden searing pain in his shoulder. But where were the others? Had there really been flames inside the fuselage or had he dreamed it? He’d ordered them to bail out. He must have bailed out too. But he didn’t have a parachute. Then he remembered his stomach crashing into his throat, suffocating him, as he’d catapulted from the plane, turning helpless somersaults and screaming as the earth rushed towards him. How come he’d survived? It wasn’t possible. He closed his eyes and slept. In his dream, Judith was standing beside him, holding his hand.
Bathed in perspiration despite the cold, he woke, mumbling and confused. Which was reality and which was fantasy? His tongue stuck to his mouth. He was at the mercy of a stranger who could have a sinister motive for keeping him there. What a fool he had been to swallow the tablets. When he looked down, he saw he was wearing pyjamas instead of his air-force uniform. Had they taken away his clothes so he couldn’t escape? And where was his cigarette case?
He didn’t hear the baroness enter.
‘You are looking a little better now,’ she said, holding a glass of water to his lips. ‘You didn’t look so good after you fell out of the sky.’
She had seen the enemy plane turn into a ball of fire, plummet down, and crash somewhere to the east of the castle. Several days later, while walking around her estate with her dogs, she heard them barking and whining under a giant spruce.
‘You were stuck upside down in that tree, wedged in the top branches, almost frozen stiff. The caretaker had to use a ladder to get you down.’
‘Why did you bring me here?’ he asked incredulously.
‘You were injured,’ she said. ‘You needed a doctor.’
He rephrased the question. ‘How come you didn’t send for the Gestapo?’
‘Ah. That’s another story.’ She rose. ‘Rest now. The doctor will come soon.’ And she disappeared once more.
Dr Hermann checked Adam’s pulse, listened to his heartbeat, and told him to cough while he tapped his back.
Then he looked up. ‘The human body is as resilient as the mind is weak,’ he said.
His pink scalp showed through the thin strands of greying hair, and the bony face was covered in brown splotches but the bright eyes behind the shiny glasses showed no sign of age.
‘With your fractures and internal injuries, I wouldn’t have given you much of a chance,’ the doctor said. ‘Someone has been watching over you.’
Adam thought about the missing cigarette case and wondered whether his luck would now run out.
‘So when —’ he began and stopped. There was no point hurrying to get away. He was probably safer there than outside. British airmen wouldn’t be very popular in Germany.
The doctor answered his unspoken question. ‘Be patient. In two weeks we’ll remove the dressings, then we’ll see about your collarbone and leg, and work out a regime of exercise to strengthen your muscles.’
As they were leaving the room, Adam heard the baroness urging the doctor to slip out through the back door, and realised the risk they were taking, looking after an enemy airman.
The light was fading when Maria von Schaffenburg returned with some clear broth in a Dresden porcelain bowl. She pulled up a straight-backed wooden chair beside the bed, and, while he ate, she answered his questions in a quiet, unemotional voice.
She was a widow when the war broke out, and was proud that her sons were fighting for the Fatherland. Ernst had joined the Luftwaffe while Friedrich had become an officer in the Wehrmacht. While they were away, the local authorities started rounding up the local Jews and taking them away. One night, Dr Hermann came to see her, white-faced. His wife was Jewish. Would the baroness hide her and their daughter? The following night, the Jewish estate manager brought his wife and two small children. By the end of the week, she was hiding eight Jews in the cellar.
‘I love my country and believed that the Führer was building a better Germany,’ she said, fingering the gold cross around her neck. ‘I thought Dachau was a place for criminals, but when Jewish people I knew were rounded up, beaten and deported, I knew something was wrong. So when they came to me for help, I couldn’t turn them away. I prayed for guidance and God gave me the strength to do it.’
Whether it was the surly housemaid who was envious of her employer’s wealth, or the self-righteous cook trying to ingratiate herself with the local Gestapo chief, she never found out. But late one night she was woken by someone banging on the heavy oak door. Two Gestapo officers pushed past her with the flat unseeing stare of dead fish, and started searching the house. Soon she heard screams and scuffles as they dragged the fugitives outside at gunpoint. When she pleaded with them to leave the children at least, they warned her to watch out or she’d be arrested for harbouring Jews.
‘I didn’t know we were waging war on our own women and children,’ she retorted.
They grabbed her, drove her to the station and kept her in a damp cell for a week, threatening to send her to Dachau to teach her a lesson. They only released her because of her position in the village, and the fact that her sons were fighting for the Reich. But every few days Gestapo agents turned up — ostensibly to search the castle but really to threaten her.
When Friedrich came home on leave from the Eastern front, he was shocked to hear that his mother had been terrorised. From his strained white face, she sensed he was brooding over something, until one evening he told her what he had witnessed in some Ukrainian villages.
‘I enlisted to be a soldier to defend the Fatherland, not to supervise death squads that shot women and children,’ he told her. She still shuddered at the recollection of the massacres in the forests he had described.
The following morning he had visited the Gestapo chief to complain about the way his mother had been treated, and filed a report to the authorities about the carnage he’d witnessed on the Eastern front.
She paused and stared past Adam as she fiddled with her cross. A few days after Friedrich’s return, there was a military parade in town, which he had attended. Late that afternoon, there was a knock on her door.
‘Gnädige Frau,’ the uniformed policeman said, clicking his heels. ‘There has been an accident. Unfortunately your son was run over. We took him to the hospital but it was too late.’
Something seemed to be stuck in her throat. She stopped speaking and stared at her hands.
‘But you don’t think it was an accident,’ Adam said.
She shook her head. ‘The Gestapo killed him. He was making a nuisance of himself, with his complaints and stories of what was going on in the east.’
After a long silence, Adam asked, ‘What about your other son?’
‘Ernst’s plane crashed over Britain early in the war. I pray for him every night.’
‘You’re risking your life having me here.’
‘A risk is better than a sin,’ she said. ‘I talk to God every night and listen to what he tells me. I also listen to Dr Hermann. He says there’s a camp not far from here, like Dachau, where they do terrible things. I’m too old to close my eyes and pretend it has nothing to do with me. I can’t allow others to mould my thoughts any more.’
She looked at him with a steadfast gaze. ‘When I found you hanging upside down in that tree, I made a pact with God. If I looked after you like my own son, He would bring my son home to me.’
The light had gone, night fell, and they sat in the dark, unwilling to break the silence.
‘From what I’ve seen, God doesn’t always keep his part of the bargain,’ Adam said.
She sighed. ‘That’s a risk I’m prepared to take. It looks as though the war will end soon, so I’ll find out.’
She was about to go out of the room but turned back and took something from the pocket of her apron. ‘I had to burn your uniform, but I found this inside your shirt.’
It was the cigarette case.