Orphaned Leaves Read online

  ORPHANED LEAVES

  Christopher Holt

  Copyright © 2018 Christopher Holt

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

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  Matador® is an imprint of Troubador Publishing Ltd

  “No man knows how bad he is till he has tried very hard to be good.”

  C.S. Lewis

  Contents

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  1

  August 22nd, 1939

  From Adolf Hitler’s Obersalzberg Speech to His Wehrmacht Commanders

  “I put my Death’s Head units in readiness with the order to kill without pity or mercy all men, women and children of the Polish race or language. Only thus will we gain the Lebensraum that we require.”

  A Forest in Upper Silesia, Poland in February 1940

  “Your first murder is like your first love. You never forget it.” His breath steams in the freezing air, it reeks of schnapps. Trummler is as maudlin as a lost dog.

  The younger officer clenches his fists in frustration. Trummler’s ramblings have delayed the Aktion by an hour and still more prisoners are being offloaded from the lorries. Frick struggles to keep his voice calm, saying, “Herr Hauptsturmführer, we cannot fall behind. Our orders are to keep up with the advance. We’ve one last batch coming straight after this one. If we don’t hurry, sir, it will be too dark to proceed.”

  Trummler’s eyes are bulging more than usual. They look ready to burst. “Another batch? What do you mean, Frick, are you talking about loaves of bread?”

  Frick is at his wit’s end. The condemned are already being lined up at the pit’s edge, they are all shivering. Any moment one of them, especially a child, could topple in. That’s all it would take to start pandemonium. It appeared that the Hauptsturmführer must be out of his mind and Frick is desperately trying to decide if he should take over command.

  And, now, of all things, Trummler starts whimpering like an infant, his thick Swabian consonants slur into a passionate tirade and his voice rises.

  “Frick, just listen. Listen.” Tears are running down his cheeks and his frame begins to sway. Frick steps towards him in case the man needs support, but Trummler steadies himself and wipes a gloved hand across his face. His voice is quieter now.

  “Can you explain to me, Frick, why Standartenführer Krüger has given orders that we are never to make eye contact with a prisoner?”

  Frick stares at him. “I don’t know; I just don’t know, Herr Hauptsturmführer.”

  “But surely it must be obvious to you, Frick. It’s because once you look him in the eye he’s no longer an Untermensch, he becomes a real human being and then if you kill him… God help you.” Trummler starts his blubbing again, then without acknowledging Frick’s salute, he lumbers off, bear-like, to the Opel where his driver is waiting to take him back to Base Headquarters .

  Frick assumes command and the Scharführer awaits his signal. The procedure has been finely drilled and Frick only has to give three nods. His eyes sweep down the line of Untermenschen, who are spaced out at one-arm intervals along the edge of the trench. At his first nod, eight Schutzstaffel privates rush forwards with long planks, which they raise horizontally behind the adults’ knees and level with the shoulders of the toddlers. Again, Frick nods and twenty-four executioners step up with Lüger pistols. Frick nods again and the executioners shoot the victims in the back of the head, and at once the eight Schützen tip their planks so the bodies drop in a straight line on top of the previous batch, what Krüger calls ‘Sardinenpackung’.

  Frick needs to be vigilant; he recalls one of Heydrich’s remarks at the commencement of the Aktion campaign.

  “Sub-humans do not give up their lives easily, they’re like polecats. Have you ever tried to kill a polecat?”

  A few of the victims are still emitting signs of life, but the moment the executioners hear a groan or spot a gasping mouth their pistols are ready. Frick hears the wheezing of a baby girl cut short by two shots in close succession. An old man twists his face to the sky, his lips are moving, another shot.

  Finally, all the bodies are still. A soft vapour rises above them and whitens to frost. A woman’s arm juts skyward like a dead branch. Her wedding ring gleams in the low sun until one agile Schütze leaps down to wrench it off her finger.

  After commanding his first execution, Frick feels a terrifying calm. He stares at the edge of the pit where the blood is already freezing into little pulks. They remind him of what, rubies? They are too dark; they would have to be garnets – no, they are more like ripe cherries. He gazes into the trees and wonders what the forest would be like in autumn: a place to go looking for wild berries – and mushrooms. He catches a reddish movement in one of the pines, a tufty head on a low branch. Surely a squirrel shouldn’t be this red in the middle of winter and, anyway, why isn’t it hibernating?

  He returns his gaze to the bodies in the pit and notes how the cheeks of a baby boy are bulging out; he looks like one of those porcelain cherubs that they make in Thuringia. A flap of wings, and a large bird swoops down and starts pecking at the child’s eyes. Is it a raven or just a carrion crow? Frick feels ashamed that he doesn’t know the difference.

  He winces at a stab of pain from an exposed nerve in a lower tooth. It’s a recent worry because, at twenty-four, Frick still rigidly maintains the physical requirements of the SS when he first enlisted in 1937. One of these is that he possesses a full set of teeth without fillings, though now the Reich is at war he supposes it doesn’t matter very much, but he’ll still need to find a dentist in Uppeln.

  The long shadows of the silver birches straddle the trench as the short winter day ebbs into dusk. There is just enough time to deal with the last consignment, and the executioners stub out their cigarettes in the snow. A groaning bulldozer starts scooping up a long mound of loose earth and gravel
ready to cover the bodies before nightfall.

  Frick’s boyish voice cuts through the icy wind. “Bring up the last group, Scharführer. Quickly now.”

  The sergeant salutes him. “Yes, Herr Obersturmführer.” The man stamps his feet to keep up his circulation, then hurries to the edge of the woods and blows his whistle. Somewhere in the trees another whistle responds and heavy diesel engines rumble into life. Frick hears the crunching of massive tyres over gravel and ice as three tarpaulin-clad lorries rumble into the clearing and clunk to a halt. Six privates drag back the tarpaulins to reveal the galleries of ashen faces, their eyes squinting from the light.

  Frick scrutinises them as they assist each other out of the vehicles and form an apathetic line. Some of them, he supposes, would be Jews, the rest a motley crew of Polish civic leaders, professionals and so-called intellectuals. He is surprised at the number of children among this shivering group; children who, if not for the Aktion, would only grow up to breed yet more of the same despicable sub-species. His orders couldn’t be clearer: these are Untermenschen and they have to die. That is all he needs to know.

  One woman with a baby in her arms starts to sing. It sounds like a Polish hymn, but nobody joins in. A father clutches the hand of his small son and guides the boy’s attention upwards through the snow-laden sky, until goaded by the shouts and blows of the Schützen, the column shuffles forwards towards the trench.

  Trummler had given orders that the prisoners are to be allowed to be executed in their winter coats and scarves; some of the women are even in furs. Frick regards this as a criminal waste of resources. If he were permanently in charge, he would follow the procedure of other Aktion groups and order the condemned to strip naked.

  He reflects that only a few days ago, these well-heeled specimens had been first assembled in a town square to be told by some immaculately uniformed Sturmbannführer that they were to be resettled in the east.

  “But what of our luggage, Sturmbannführer?” one venerable figure might have asked him and the officer would have given him a rare smile.

  “Don’t worry, old man. Your suitcases are going on ahead; they’ll be returned to you later.”

  Looking up at the deteriorating weather, Frick is glad that the faltering Trummler was at least efficient enough to requisition the lorries. Previously, the prisoners had to be marched forty kilometres from the railhead. He remembers how the temperature had been so low that the SS boots on the wooden bridges rang like metal. Often the Schützen would throw children into the icy rivers and watch as the parents jumped in after them. Frick had regarded this a useful course of action since it quickened the march and saved ammunition.

  Standing in for Trummler brings Frick more anxiety than he had bargained for. His eyes are everywhere, particularly on the weather, as he watches with apprehension how the wind is piling the fresh snow into high drifts.

  His thoughts are interrupted by wild shouting coming from the direction of the last lorry. He sees a private waving his arms and hears the sergeant blow a shrill double whistle to halt the prisoners. More Schützen are yelling to each other and rushing about in the trees. Frick strides over to the sergeant. “What is going on, Scharführer?”

  He salutes. “A woman, Herr Obersturmführer – she was hiding under the lorry. She’s taken off into the forest.”

  “By herself?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Frick is fuming, if she gets away, it will be he who will have to answer to Krüger, no one else; so much for his promotion.

  “Get the Schützen back here. You’ll have to oversee the executions yourself.”

  “Jawohl, Herr Obersturmführer.” The sergeant blows one long blast on his whistle; the Schützen return and the column creeps forwards towards the trench.

  Frick tramps through the drifts to the lorry and inspects the ground. The snow is fast obliterating the woman’s tracks, but his trained eyes detect the lay of an ancient path skirting a frozen swamp before leading into the forest. He sets off in haste, his boots squeaking in the soft drifts, certain that the slim trunks of the birches will not offer the fugitive anywhere to hide. The deep snow and skeletal undergrowth clutching at his greatcoat impede his progress and he slows to a breathless lope.

  There is no end to the massing birches, but it is not the forest that he feels is closing in on him – the trees look insubstantial when compared to the darkness between them; a darkness sucking everything into itself.

  He is startled when a derelict house looms into sight. Its upper floor tilts forwards giving the whole structure a weird, lopsided look. From its eaves, Slavic gargoyles thrust their open mouths forwards, with icicles hanging from them like canine teeth. The building is out of kilter with the soldierly trees, and its lopsidedness looks even worse because of the ecclesiastical steepness of the high, shingled roof and its two precarious onion domes.

  In the dwindling light, the dwelling evokes the terrifying illustrations in a book of fairy tales that Frick remembers from when he was child. The recollections are so vivid that, for an instant, he loses his sense of direction and blindly stumbles into a deep sawpit. Unhurt, he leaps to his feet and slaps the snow off his greatcoat.

  And there she is, barely three metres away, standing in a corner of the pit, with her pallid face framed in a wild tumble of red hair and her body as motionless as a church-yard statue. Her misting breath is the only sign that she is alive. She is wearing a long woollen coat, but what takes his attention is the russet fox-fur stole draped around her shoulders, its head resting against her hip. Her fingers clutch at the animal’s pointed face as though it is a protective talisman. Frick guesses the woman may be in her early thirties, but he can never tell with women. The two stare at each other. Her greenish eyes unnerve him, but he swallows and pulls himself together.

  It’s almost dusk and it is a relief that he can still hear the drone of the bulldozer above the whirr of the snow. It’s too late to drag the woman back. He’ll have to dispatch her here and now – his first personal killing.

  Damn Trummler. What would the man have him do? Judging by her features, she looks part Aryan, but that’s no reason to spare her; she’s already been condemned and he has to go through with it. Or does he really want to be the first SS officer to tell Krüger that he has disobeyed a general command from the Führer?

  The woman hasn’t moved, not even as much as a shiver, despite the deathly cold. Frick slips off his gloves and gropes for the Lüger, his hand trembling. Still the woman doesn’t move. She is the easiest of targets, but it is because she is so defenceless that he finds it harder to squeeze the trigger.

  Why won’t she say something, anything – scream at him or beg for her life?

  The old fables stir in his mind. In the changing light her face is not merely pale, it is corpse white and framed by fiery red hair, but what unnerves him most is the spectral glint in her green eyes. Whatever she is, witch or half-demon, Frick only has to tell himself that he is just performing his duty. He even feels churlish for keeping her waiting.

  His finger steadies on the trigger, and he fires once, then twice into her chest. The woman goes limp, but instead of falling to earth rests partially upright against the bank. Her head swings back but her eyes stay wide open.

  He fires another two rounds directly into the white face. An eye bursts and blood pumps over her red hair, spurting out with the final beat of her heart. Her jaw falls sideways and her mouth opens. From the rags of bloodied flesh, the remaining green eye returns his gaze and is eerily possessive. The corpse still rests against the side of the pit, but the bullets have set off a small avalanche from the bank, and a splurge of snow bedecks her head and shoulders like a bridal veil. The fox stole slips from her shoulder and the animal’s yellow glass eyes stare up at him as if in judgement.

  Frick feels sick; he bends over and throws up. After his stomach is empty, he stoops to snatch a handful of snow
to rinse his mouth not once but several times, which sets off his toothache again. He grabs up more snow, not for his mouth this time but for his burning face.

  At last, he straightens up and, keeping well clear of the body, he seizes a dead tree root, drags himself out of the pit and staggers clear, shutting and opening his eyes repeatedly as if to obliterate his action. The cold penetrates his greatcoat then goes through his body right to the marrow. Before he puts on his gloves, he wraps both hands around the pistol and finds its warmth comforting.

  Again, Frick shuts his eyes, but the woman’s face lingers in banded shadows of red and green, and he cannot prevent his body trembling.

  Why didn’t I just let her go?

  When he opens his eyes again, he is shocked to see how close he is to the old house. He is actually standing in the porch and hastily moves away, but an unhealthy obsession with its appearance causes him to look back.

  His next view of the building is more chilling than before. It seems to him that the onion domes are now slanting more than the rest of the roof and with a shock he notices that the front door of the house is slightly ajar, he is sure that it was shut when he first saw it. Before he has time to take this in, he hears a rustle in the junipers behind him. Instinctively, he draws his Lüger and spins around, but sees nothing, just flecks of white spinning in the wind. His heart pumps violently and he stares about him. He listens intensely, but hears only the distant bulldozer and the snow seething through the birches. God knows what lurks in a wood like this.

  His foot resounds on level ice under the snow and he grabs onto some glassy reed stalks as, with a shock, he realises he has blundered onto the surface of the frozen swamp. He starts to go back and sees again that damned house, with its domes leaning in his direction like two crowned heads bowing in mock deference. Panic overwhelms him and he plunges through the drifts towards the whine of the bulldozer. A night bird shrieks overhead and behind him he hears the chilling scream of a fox. He quickens his pace, but the piercing screech continues as he stumbles through the snow, bent double, with the harsh wind lashing his face with icy grains as he tries to keep his direction and protect his eyes with his arms. His progress is made worse still by the tree roots entangling his feet, as though the gale is bidding the forest to drag him into its vortex. The snow drifts are much deeper under the bare deciduous trees, and once he sinks up to his waist into what he imagines must be a labyrinth of badger setts and rabbit holes. A flash thought enters his mind that he that he will be lost in the dark forest forever. Only the bulldozer’s engine assures him that he is stumbling in the right direction.