And Fritz believed him.
“But the camp in The Last Fence,” Martin was saying. “That’s Sachsenhausen, yes? They said at the office you’d been in Sachsenhausen.”
“Oranienburg, in the first camp there. They built Sachsenhausen later. They put us in an old brewery. Right in the center of town. People could see through the windows. So everyone knew.”
“But it was as you describe? You were tortured?” Martin said, unable to resist.
“No. Everyone was beaten. But the worst things—I was lucky.” Hands tied behind their backs then hung from poles until the shoulder joints separated, torn from the sockets, screams they couldn’t help, pain so terrible they finally passed out. “I wasn’t there long enough. Somebody got me out. You could still do that then. ’33. If you knew the right people.” The one thing old Fritz had left, connections.
“But in the book—”
“It’s meant to be any camp.”
“It’s nice, though, don’t you agree, to know what the author has in his mind, what he sees?”
“Well, Sachsenhausen then,” Alex said, tired of it. “The layout was described to me, so I knew what it was like. Then you invent.”
“?’33,” Martin said, backing off. “When they rounded up the Communists. You were in the Party even then?”
“No, not then,” Alex said. “I just got caught in the net. If you were sympathetic. If you had Communist friends. They scooped up all the fish and you were caught. You didn’t need to have a card.”
“And now the Americans are doing it, putting Communists in jail. They said that’s why you left.” A question. “They’re trying to destroy the Party. Just like the Nazis.” The only way it made sense to the Kulturbund.
“They’re not sending people to Sachsenhausen,” Alex said evenly. “It’s not illegal to be a Communist.”
“But I thought—”
“They want you to tell them who the others are. Give them names. And if you don’t—then that’s illegal. So they catch you that way.”
“And then to jail,” Martin said, following the logic.
“Sometimes,” Alex said vaguely.
Or deportation, the Dutch passport of convenience that had once saved his life now something to use against him. “Might I remind you, you are a guest in this country?” The congressman with the thick athlete’s neck, who probably thought exile a greater threat than prison. And let Alex slip away.
“So you came home to Germany,” Martin said, making a story.
“Yes, home,” Alex said, looking out the window again.
“So, that’s good,” Martin said, the story’s end.
There were city buildings now, the jagged graveyard streets of the newsreels, Friedrichshain probably, given the direction they were coming from. He tried to picture the map in his head—Grosse Frankfurter Strasse?—looking for some familiar landmark, but all he could see were faceless bombed-out buildings heaped with rubble. He thought of the women handing down pails of debris, hammering mortar off reusable bricks—and four years later the rubble was still here, mountains of it. How much had there been? Standing walls were pockmarked by shelling, marooned in empty spaces where buildings had collapsed, leaving gaps for the wind to rush through. The streets, at least, had been cleared but were still lined on either side with piles of bricks and smashed porcelain and twisted metal. Even the smell of bombing, the burned wood and the sour lime of broken cement, was still in the air. But maybe, like the airlift planes, you didn’t notice after a while.
“You still have family in Germany?” Martin was asking.
“No. No one,” Alex said. “They waited too long.” He turned to Martin, as if it needed to be explained. “My father had the Iron Cross. He thought it would protect him.”
But did he? Or was it simply a cover for a fatalism so knowing and desperate that it couldn’t be admitted? It was almost as if he had exhausted himself getting Alex out. How much had it cost? Enough to wipe out Fritz’s debts? More?
“You owe him your gratitude,” was all his father would say.
“You should come too,” Alex had said.
His father shook his head. “There’s no need. Not for me. I’m not the one they send to prison for having such friends. The Engel boy, he was always trouble. Who does he think he is, Liebknecht? Times like these, you stay quiet.” He took Alex’s shoulder. “You’ll be back. This is Germany, you know, not some Slavic— So it passes and you’ll come back. Nothing is forever. Not the Nazis. Now don’t worry your mother.”
But it turned out the Nazis were forever, long enough anyway to turn his parents into ash, seeping into the soil somewhere in Poland.
“There’s Alexanderplatz up ahead,” Martin said.