Life changed after Simeon’s death. The farm began to fail, not all in one tumble, but little by little. Things that wore out were not replaced. Livestock dwindled. Crops did not have just one bad year, which most farmers expected, but several in a row.
Miss Hurst employed a manager, but the place became less and less prosperous. She herself did not change very much with the years; she continued to have her elderflower wine – ‘Just a little nip for comfort,’ she said – and the vicar continued to call regularly. Miss Hurst was always pleased to see him – a very kind gentleman, she said, entirely trustworthy, and most helpful over financial affairs. She did not understand these things, and Simeon had always handled such matters. If she had to go to the bank or the solicitor’s offices, the vicar always accompanied her, and his sister went along as well, because dear Cuthbert was an unworldly soul, and must be guarded against hussies such as Mildred Hurst. So they had gone all together in the vicar’s little rattletrap car, Miss Hurst in the back, her feet primly together, the vicar’s sister seated in the front so that Miss Hurst could not throw out any lures.
After Mildred’s death, there was a note for Leo which the solicitor handed to him.
‘I can’t leave Willow Bank Farm to you, Leo,’ she had written. ‘I should like to, but there are cousins who have a legal claim and there’s nothing I can do about it.’ Reading that, Leo had supposed there was some kind of entail. He had never expected to be left the farm, anyway. But Mildred Hurst had left him a fair sum of money. ‘The life savings of my brother and myself,’ the note said. ‘Dear Leo, you were the son I never had.’
Leo had cried over that, quietly and genuinely. He wished he had known what she meant to do, because he could have told her how very grateful he was, not specifically for the money, but for the home she and her brother had given him.
The vicar’s sister had been right in saying nobody would want Deadlight Hall. It had crouched on its patch of scrubby land, quietly decaying, its windows falling in, its stonework gradually covered by creeping moss and lichen. Sometimes Leo had frightening dreams about the misshapen shadow who had walked the dark corridors, and the voice calling for the children. After a while the dreams became less frequent, but they never quite went away.
He never forgot Deadlight Hall. Of course he did not – it was not the kind of place anyone could forget. It was reassuring, though, to remember that it was still standing empty. No one will ever live there, he had thought. It will fall down of its own accord in the end, and the shadow and whatever was in that furnace room will go.
But if he was able to push Deadlight Hall into the corners of his mind, he was never able to do the same thing with Sophie and Susannah. Just as Deadlight Hall was not the kind of place to forget, Sophie and Susannah were not the kind of people to forget, either.
As the years slid past he gradually accepted it was unlikely he would ever find out what had happened to them.
London
1944
Dear J.W.
Later today I shall try to get on a train for the journey home, although it is not easy to do so, and I may have to make several attempts. All the trains are constantly crowded with service men and women, some wounded, others who are joining or rejoining their regiments. So although I hope to be home in the next few days, it could be longer.
Yesterday I heard from Schönbrunn – a letter sent from the very lip of Auschwitz itself. I cannot begin to imagine how he was able to get a letter out from there, but it should not surprise me that his remarkable network stretches even to the town of Oswiecim. He has never talked much about that network, but from time to time I have had glimpses of it – of people with whom a letter or a message can be left … A small shop in an unobtrusive side street where the shopkeeper can be trusted … Stone bridges spanning narrow rivers where there are cavities within the stones, allowing messages to be left for collection …
At times I almost wonder if Schönbrunn is real, for he seems to inhabit the pages of an adventure story or some strange and vivid fantasy. There have been occasions in his company when I have remembered the old legends, and in particular that of the Golem of Prague – the real one, that is, not the two that Leo and the Reiss twins had. You know the old tale, of course – indeed, it is part of our heritage. How that Golem was constructed of clay, and brought to life to defend the Prague ghetto How, later, it was entombed in a hiding place in the Old New Synagogue, and how, when the tomb-like hiding place was broken open at the end of the nineteenth century, no trace of it was found. And how it is prophesied that the golem will be restored to life again if it is ever needed to protect our people.
I have reread those last two sentences, and I wonder, as I have often wondered, how people can say there are no links between the great religions of the world.
I dare say you are smiling as you read all this, and saying, ‘Oy, that Maurice Bensimon, he is such a dream-spinner.’ If ever I were to write my memoirs, the dreams I would spin of these years would be dark ones. So on consideration, I shall never do so. I will only say, instead, that whatever Schönbrunn is, or is not, he has the most extraordinary strength of mind and will of any man I have ever met, and his courage is humbling.
It seems too much of a risk to entrust his actual letter to the post, so instead I am copying down the main information here for you. Performing such a mundane task will help to calm my mind and will fill up the hours until I can be on my way to Waterloo Station.
Schönbrunn writes:
‘One of the curious things about this place is that when the word Auschwitz is uttered, one simply thinks of the camp itself – the grim grey barracks inside the barbed-wire, as if it is a desolate and solitary entity set amidst a wilderness. But although wilderness there is, the old town of Oswiecim is quite nearby, and people still live in it. I will not say they live in normality, but they pursue their lives as well as they can.
‘The Germans have drained the swamps that once lay everywhere, but traces of the dank, misty bogland still linger, and it is as if a dark miasma hangs over the old town – as if the misery and the fear has seeped outwards from the camp itself.
‘Since the occupation, the population has dwindled to a sad fragment. A great many people have been driven from their homes, and numerous small villages have been wiped from the map entirely. It saddens and angers me to think of those lost villages – their histories vanished, their stories and their people wiped from the landscape for ever.
‘In happier circumstances I would have wanted to delve into Oswiecim’s history, but I shall not do so. I want no memories of this place to lodge in my mind.
‘Part of me is praying Sophie and Susannah Reiss will not be here – that this will prove to be a false lead. But there is another part that hopes they are here, because that will mean I can take action to rescue them. But if Mengele does have them I cannot bear to contemplate what may be happening to them.
‘I beg you, do not let the Reiss family know any of this.’
Schönbrunn then went on to write that he had found lodgings in the town.
‘They are not good, but I have stayed in worse. My landlady is a lugubrious but kindly soul, and this morning she told me how everyone in the area knows what goes on inside the camp.
‘“They think they keep the secrets of what they do in there,” she said, “but we all know that exterminations go on all the time. And there are the experiments, also – performed by the one they call the Angel of Death.”
‘My mind sprang to attention at this, but as if I had never heard the name – as if it is not burned into my brain – I only said, “Who is the Angel of Death?”
‘“He works on the children,” she said. “Terrible things, they say he does. He is not always there – he has other places he visits and where he works. But I have seen him walk around occasionally. He looks for the children – it’s said he always has sweets in his pockets for them. He talks to them and listens to their tales.” A pause. “And then he carries them off to his laboratories,” she said.
‘“What happens to them there?”
‘“No one knows. But few of those children are ever seen again.”
‘“You know that for certain?”
‘“No. I know the other deaths are for certain, though. When the wind is in the right direction the stench comes into the town. It cannot be mistaken – it is from the continuous burning of the bodies,” she said. “Thick, sweet, mixed with the acrid stench of the heat. You taste it in your nose for days. You would like coffee now?”
‘The coffee is terrible, gritty and sour, but today I drank it thankfully, hoping it might wash away her words. It did not, of course.
‘Oh, M.B., one day this may all be part of the past and they may build monuments and memorials to the people slaughtered here, but nothing anyone can ever do will succeed in wiping from my mind the things I am seeing – the hopelessness and the fear in the faces of the people being herded along the railway tracks towards the camp. Those images have seared into my mind like acid, and they will always be black and grey and drenched in despair, threaded with spider webs of railway lines that all lead to one place. There will be no colour in my memories of Auschwitz.
‘Please remember that if you do not hear from me again, you should not assume I have failed.’
The letter ended on this half-optimistic, half-warning note. But despite the optimism I fear we shall not hear from him again – not ever. This morning came a visit from one of the miscellany of people who make up that secret network. How the man had tracked me down in this modest boarding house on London’s outskirts – how he even knew of my existence – I have no idea. But he did find me somehow.
‘I believe we have lost him this time,’ he said, facing me in the dingy guests’ lounge, sipping tea (we cannot get coffee at the moment).
My heart did not sink at his words; it seemed to constrict as if iron bands had clamped around it.
I said, ‘He’s indestructible.’
‘Not this time.’ He looked at me very levelly. He has that direct look Schönbrunn’s people almost always have. ‘I saw him for myself. I saw him go towards those gates—’
‘Auschwitz?’
‘Yes. I was waiting for him in hiding – there is not much hiding, but Schönbrunn found a place. But I was close enough to even read the legend above the gates. Arbeit Macht Frei.’
‘Work will free you,’ I said, half to myself.
‘Yes. Was ever there a crueller irony than those words? Beyond those gates are the barracks with their rows of grim cell-like rooms – and the places about which those dread rumours have circulated. We do not need to name them. We both know what they are. Schönbrunn waited until he heard army trucks coming along the road. Then he walked out and waved them down.’
‘Why?’
‘I don’t know.’ A shrug. ‘He never tells anyone all of his plans. I could not see what the trucks carried – not prisoners, I don’t think. Supplies of some kind, perhaps. There was some interchange between Schönbrunn and the driver – I could not hear it, and it was in rapid German anyway. Then three of the soldiers sprang out of the truck and almost threw him into the vehicle.’
‘And?’ I said, as he broke off.
‘They drove through the gates into the camp,’ he said. ‘My belief is that he had some story ready to tell them – he has used several, as you know.’
‘But this time they did not believe him.’
‘Or,’ said my companion, ‘this time someone was one step ahead and had warned the Nazis that he was coming.’
‘A traitor among his own people?’
‘I’m afraid so. In which case, Schönbrunn will now be dead.’
If Schönbrunn is dead I cannot see how we will ever find out what happened to Sophie and Susannah. But I shall stay hopeful that being taken into Auschwitz was part of his plan – that he intended to get in there all along, and that he spun those Germans a deliberately thin cover story. But it is a vain hope.
And so the whereabouts of the Reiss twins is as unknown as it ever was. I fear we may never find out the truth.
M.B.