Tom
Germany, September 1944
Lying on the bed in his clean, comfortable cell at Weissburg Prison, Tom marvelled that ever since he’d arrived, no-one had even tried to bash him. After the hell of Camp Reinsfeld, this felt like a holiday retreat. The first astonishing thing he noticed as soon as he stepped into the neat cobbled courtyard the previous day was that the guards weren’t armed with cudgels or pick-axe shafts. In fact they didn’t have any weapons at all, and they weren’t yelling abuse.
The reason for this became clear when the camp superintendent addressed them. Oskar Schmidt was a broad-shouldered man with greying hair and a purposeful stride that suggested a military background.
‘This is a law-abiding detention centre,’ he said. ‘In here, you will be treated decently and I have forbidden the guards to hit you.’ Tom and Harry exchanged glances, incredulous that they’d no longer be at the mercy of Nazi sadists.
But after several days, the novelty of this benign environment began to wear off, and Tom felt restless. At Camp Reinsfeld his every waking thought had been focussed on avoiding blows. He had lived second by second, driven only by the need to survive one more day. But now that the threat of brutality had been removed, he began to take stock of his situation.
He had survived that horror camp. But for what? His mind roamed back to the world he had left behind, a world he longed for more each day with an ache that never let up. That ache was sharpened by the realisation that his homeland didn’t care what happened to him. Little did they know, as he now did, that the Germans in Jersey were not the real Germans at all. They had fooled them by cloaking their vicious nature in polite manners.
But there was no point reviling the Jersey government when his own family had washed their hands of him. Even his father, who had always extolled the superiority of British courage, had done nothing to rescue him. Some hero Dad turned out to be, he thought, recalling the way he had colluded in his wife’s illegal business and outrageous flirting with German officers. As for his mother, he had no illusions about her. He longed for the sweetness of revenge.
She had handed him over to the Germans without any qualms, and for all she knew or cared, he might be dead. Casting his mind back over his childhood, bitter memories succeeded each other like scenes on a movie reel. His mother had never been interested in him or his achievements unless they reflected well on her. She had never bothered to attend sports carnivals to watch him swim or run, and whenever he brought home sporting trophies, she shoved them into a cupboard, complaining that they’d only gather dust if left on the mantelpiece. The only time he remembered her praising him was when she boasted about his good German, and that was only to curry favour with her Kraut friends.
And there was Milly. Hers was a double betrayal. By consorting with a German she had not only betrayed him but their country as well.
He indulged in a daydream that made him smile. The war was over, the Germans defeated, and he had returned to Jersey. He was strolling along the Esplanade when Milly ran up to him, crying. She wanted him back because her Kraut boyfriend was in a British prisoner-of-war camp, and everyone had ostracised her for being a collaborator. But he pushed her away and told her it served her right for abandoning him and taking up with the enemy.
His French companions vowed they would shave the heads of women who had collaborated, but even in his fantasy of revenge, he couldn’t bring himself to wish that for Milly. Or even for his mother.
Dwelling on past grievances and dreaming of revenge helped him forget that he didn’t know what was happening in the outside world. Who was winning the war? His father had always said that Britain would never give in, and Mr Churchill said much the same, but Britain had never encountered Hitler.
The guards often taunted them, saying that German victory was imminent. ‘You French are finished anyway, and we’re getting the better of Britain and America all over Europe,’ they would gloat. ‘Just wait, you’ll see, the Führer will soon rule the world.’
Some of the French and Luxembourger prisoners who had recently been transferred to the prison told him that the Allies had been bombing German cities for some time. They mentioned Hamburg and Dresden, and whispered that the Russians were advancing from the east, but Tom found that hard to believe because the guards never mentioned it, and the war still dragged on.
Occasionally he heard the distant hum of aeroplane engines and recalled the terrible June day when German Dorniers had bombed St Helier. Four years had passed since then, but to Tom it seemed a lifetime ago.
If the planes he sometimes heard flying overhead were British Lancasters, he prayed their mission would be successful, but at the same time he was terrified in case they dropped their bombs on Weissburg Prison and killed the prisoners along with their guards.
As he mulled over the progress of the war, his gaze fell on the pile of small squares of German newspaper that the guard left beside his toilet pan every morning. Spreading them out on the floor, he tried to fit the squares together to see if he could form one complete article, but the pieces must have come from different papers and contained disconnected snippets.
Occasionally he came across a few lines that boasted of German victories, but if what the new prisoners had said was true, perhaps these newspaper articles were feeding readers lies and propaganda. As he continued to study the squares, he noticed that many of them contained black-edged notices announcing the deaths of German soldiers, and he was shocked to see that some of them were even younger than he was.
He started counting. His newspaper squares contained over a hundred names. The articles might be lying but the obituaries had to be genuine. And if so many of their soldiers were dying, perhaps the tide of war was turning against Germany after all.
Tom longed to discuss this with Harry and their French companions, but he was alone in his cell at night, and had to wait until the next day. Just then, from the cell across the corridor he heard a fit of coughing that terrified him. It was Harry, and he sounded as if he was coughing his lungs out. The optimism he’d felt a moment earlier vanished.
Harry’s ribs protruded under his translucent skin, and his cheeks were hollow. When the prisoners jogged around the courtyard for their thirty minutes of exercise each morning, Harry could only manage to shuffle, hardly able to catch his breath. He insisted he was fine, just out of condition. Tom hoped that the improved conditions at Weissburg would soon put flesh on his bones and build him up.
He was looking for Harry in the exercise yard next morning to tell him about the obituaries in the German paper, when Luc, the joker among the French prisoners, ran up to him. For once he looked serious.
‘Hey, Churchill, did you know they took your friend to the sick bay this morning?’ he asked, still puffing from his jog around the perimeter of the yard.
Without waiting to hear any more, Tom rushed to see Dr Le Clerc, the French medic.
‘I have admitted your friend to our hospital,’ the doctor told him. ‘He has a fever and is spitting blood. I suspect he has tuberculosis, but I will have him tested to make sure.’
Tom’s heart was hammering. ‘But he’ll be all right, won’t he?’
‘We will know when we have the results,’ the doctor said gently.
‘Can I go and see him?’
Dr Le Clerc shook his head. ‘I have placed him in the isolation ward.’
‘But he’ll be all right?’
The doctor’s silence wasn’t reassuring.
For the rest of the day, one thought kept going around in Tom’s head: Harry had to get better. He had to. Everyone respected the French doctor, even the Germans in the town, who trusted him more than their own physicians. He’d soon fix Harry.
But despite his determined optimism, Tom knew that TB was highly contagious and had caused the death of many prisoners. ‘But Harry will get better,’ he kept telling himself as he paced around his cell.
As usual he was hungry. Although the food at Weissburg was more generous than that at Camp Reinsfeld, he hadn’t put on any weight. Dr Le Clerc, who had noticed how thin he and Harry were, had told him that he’d asked for their rations to be increased.
That afternoon the prison superintendent called Tom into his office, which smelled strongly of tobacco. On the corner of his timber desk was a framed family photograph. Tom studied it with interest. A woman in what he supposed was a traditional German outfit, a sort of pinafore over an embroidered blouse with puffed sleeves, her hair in a thick plait on top of her head like a crown, had her arms around two pretty teenage girls who were similarly attired. They were all beaming into the camera. It had never occurred to Tom that the men in charge of these prisons had loving families they went home to at the end of the day.
Puffing on his pipe, Oskar Schmidt followed Tom’s glance and waited for several moments before asking him to sit down.
‘I have raised the matter of your rations with the local Gestapo, but I’m sorry to say that they categorically refused to increase them,’ he said, and Tom wondered if he’d imagined a glimmer of concern in the superintendent’s deep-set eyes.
Resting his pipe in the ashtray, he continued, ‘I want you to know that I was a prisoner of war in 1918. The British treated me very well, so when I was appointed here, I decided to treat enemy prisoners the same way. I want you and your friend to survive so when you go back home, you’ll be able to tell people that not all Germans were the same.’
Tom was so amazed that he forgot his disappointment about the rations. Schmidt’s implied criticism of the Nazi regime was surprising, and Tom wondered if it hinted at the possibility of German defeat. Back in his cell, he went over every word of that conversation. So there were decent Germans who didn’t abuse their power.
He wished he could tell Harry what Oskar Schmidt had said. That would cheer him up. And if he felt optimistic, his body would probably recover more quickly.
He couldn’t stop thinking about his friend lying in the isolation ward, sick and alone. Tom trusted Dr Le Clerc to take care of him, but the doctor was run off his feet with so many patients to look after. How much time could he devote to Harry?
The more he thought about it, the more agitated he became. Harry was his only friend in the whole world, the only person he admired and trusted. He had never let him down and never would. Tom had to do something to help him.
Finally he figured out what to do. His plan involved deception and danger, but for Harry’s sake he would risk it.
One week later, when he entered the isolation ward, he was shocked by Harry’s appearance. Only ten days had passed since they’d last seen each other, but Harry’s bones protruded like sharp rocks inside a bag of flimsy material. There were feverish spots on his sunken cheeks, and his eyes glittered with an unnatural brilliance.
His face lit up as soon as he saw Tom, and he tried to sit up but almost immediately he fell back against his pillow. His delight at seeing Tom quickly changed to dismay.
‘You shouldn’t be here, Tom,’ he rasped. ‘Don’t you realise you’re risking your life? We all have tuberculosis. Do you realise how contagious it is?’
Just then one of the patients began to cough and Harry looked at Tom meaningfully. ‘You have to go. How come they let you come in?’ Then he looked at Tom with concern. ‘You’re not ill, are you?’
Exhausted and out of breath, he started coughing, and placed a handkerchief over his mouth. When he took it away, Tom winced. It was spotted with blood.
‘Don’t worry about me,’ he whispered, looking around to make sure no-one overheard. ‘I’m not sick.’
‘Thank God for that,’ Harry said. Then he gave Tom a suspicious look. ‘But I don’t understand. If you’re not ill, how come they let you in here?’
Tom placed a mask over his face and moved closer to Harry. For the next ten minutes he explained that he had feigned tuberculosis to deceive the doctor. ‘I did it so I could stay close to you,’ he said.
As Harry listened to Tom, his eyes widened and he looked more incredulous with every word. After Tom finished describing his subterfuge, Harry kept shaking his head in disbelief.
Finally he said, ‘Are you saying you substituted the sputum of one of the infected prisoners for your own, so that when they tested it, they thought you were the one with TB?
Tom nodded. He was proud that his scheme had worked. It was worth it to see Harry again. But instead of praising him, his friend looked horrified.
‘But why did you do it, Tom? Why did you put yourself in such terrible danger?’
Tom hesitated. It would sound too soppy to confess that he missed him and couldn’t bear to leave him to suffer alone, perhaps never to see him again.
Too soppy to admit that Harry was the best person he knew, and that after everything they’d been through together, he couldn’t abandon him.
‘Life was getting boring in here so I decided to get a bit of excitement. To play Russian roulette. Also, I heard that there was more food in your ward.’
But Harry didn’t smile. ‘You did the wrong thing, Tom,’ he said, pausing between each word to catch his breath. ‘Dr Le Clerc is a wonderful man. It was wrong to deceive him. And you shouldn’t have put yourself in danger like this. Promise me that you’ll go and see him and own up.’
His eyes, grown huge in his thin face, pierced Tom as if they were looking into his soul. He sensed that Harry was summoning every ounce of his remaining strength to induce him to live honourably and tell the truth.
Overwhelmed by conflicting emotions, his admiration for Harry’s unwavering principles, his disappointment that his friend hadn’t approved of the only unselfish thing he’d ever done, and his alarm at his condition, Tom couldn’t speak. He uttered a croaking sound that might have started off as a false laugh but almost turned into a sob. He looked down and stared at his hands to avoid Harry’s relentless gaze.
Suddenly he blurted, ‘I only did it to keep you company.’
Harry’s eyes brightened with tears. He swallowed and tried to speak but all he could do was nod.
‘We’ll have a lot to tell them when we get home, won’t we,’ Tom said, and forced a smile.
Harry shook his head. ‘I won’t make it, Tom. Remember you promised me once that you’d survive so you could tell my parents what happened to me? So get out of here before you get infected or you won’t be able to keep your promise.’
Exhausted by speaking, he struggled to catch his breath, and the next coughing fit lasted longer than the one before.
‘Don’t talk tommyrot. You’re going to get better,’ Tom said, but Harry was gazing at him with an expression that he found unnerving.
He looked away. ‘All right, I’ll tell the doc what I did, but it means I won’t be able to come and see you anymore.’
Harry managed a weak smile. ‘That’s good, Tom.’ He pointed to some bread on the small table beside his bed. ‘Take it,’ he whispered. ‘You’re always hungry and I won’t eat it.’
Tom started to reply, but something in Harry’s eyes silenced him. Harry seemed to be looking at him from some faraway place, as if he was struggling to communicate something that he lacked the strength to express in words.
‘Tom, I have a big favour to ask.’ Harry’s voice was so faint that Tom had to lean closer to hear him. ‘Please don’t leave me here.’
Tom thought he was referring to the isolation ward, until he added, ‘One day, when the war is over, will you come back for me? I don’t want to stay in Germany. I’d like to be buried in that old cemetery behind St Mark’s, under the oak trees.’
Tom wanted to shout Don’t talk like that, you’re not going to die! He wanted to argue with Harry or say something comforting, but he was too numb to speak and remained silent. He couldn’t bring himself to tell Harry the one thing his friend wanted to hear, that he would do what he asked. Saying it would mean facing something he couldn’t bear to contemplate.
Harry’s eyes lingered on Tom and in that glance Tom knew that no words were needed. Harry understood it all, the confusion, the guilt and the regret.
‘I’m going to sleep now, Tom,’ he whispered, and closed his eyes.