The Prisoner Read online

  At the same moment, Marcel crept up behind Sivertsen and made a loud quacking sound in his ear.

  The Dane pirouetted with his stick. The blow glanced off Marcel’s elbow as he dived on to his bunk and pulled up his mattress as a shield. Marc and the other lads started laughing.

  ‘What’s this?’ a senior guard named Fischer roared through the doorway. ‘Why is this taking so long?’

  Sivertsen was a joke, but Fischer scared everyone. He was a Great War veteran on the wrong side of sixty, but a lifetime hauling cargo in the docks had kept him tough and he had a reputation for stomping inmates who talked back.

  ‘We’re all getting ready, sir,’ Laurent said.

  Fischer gave fellow guard Sivertsen a contemptuous look. ‘Are you in control here, officer?’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ Sivertsen said, anxious not to look weak in front of his boss. ‘Lad here says he works for the commandant.’

  Marc was about to explain, but Fischer yanked him towards the edge of his bunk and clamped a hand around his throat.

  ‘If your feet aren’t in your boots in three seconds, I’ll have you shitting blood for a month. All clear, inmate?’

  ‘Yes, boss,’ Marc croaked.

  Note

  1 Black bread – a coarse, near-black loaf, traditionally eaten by European peasants who couldn’t afford refined white flour.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Marc was among sixty workers, crunching through the gravel between railway tracks, driven to move fast by four guards at each end of the column.

  ‘Made you work for once, eh?’ Alain said, as he gave Marc a jab between the shoulder blades.

  While Marc’s cabin mates didn’t hold his admin job against him, the same couldn’t be said for some of the other lads. Alain was a thug in his late teens. He bunked with thirteen others in a big cabin next to Marc’s.

  They were a rough crew who Marc tried to avoid. If he couldn’t avoid them, he’d stick close to Laurent, who’d stand up for him. But Marc’s undersized boots were killing him. He’d fallen back in the darkness and lost sight of his friend.

  ‘Searching for lover boy?’ Alain asked, as he gave Marc another dig.

  ‘Get off me,’ Marc spat.

  The next jab was harder and made Marc stumble. He turned sharply and hissed.

  ‘What you gonna do?’ Alain teased. ‘Take a swing, see what you get.’

  Marc reckoned he could take Alain, even though he was older. But Alain’s goons would wade in if Marc got the upper hand. Even if he beat that lot, the price of victory would be a kicking from the guards.

  The prisoners bunched and stopped as a man on horseback trotted on to the tracks up ahead and started addressing the guards.

  ‘No more dawdling, you lazy pigs,’ the rider shouted pompously, as the column moved off at a brisk jog. ‘Double time!’

  Jogging pace shouldn’t have bothered young men, but physical work and hunger wears you down. The workers had heavy legs and it was easy to stumble on a railway sleeper.

  As the prisoners crunched past, the man on horseback took swipes with his riding crop, knocking one lad into another and catching a straggler nastily across the face.

  ‘Idle French scum,’ he roared, as he trotted along the tracks at the rear of the column, ready to swipe anyone who fell back. ‘The main line out of Central Station is backed up. You’ll work hard and fast or I’ll have the lot of you flogged!’

  Marc almost tumbled as he straddled a lad who’d fallen heavily, but he was less tired than the lads with manual jobs. He steadily advanced towards the front of the column, losing tormentor Alain as they jogged three kilometres along darkened tracks.

  The scene of the derailment emerged as they came around a lazy bend in the track and reached multiple tracks heading out of Frankfurt Central Station. Searchlights from an anti-aircraft battery had been swung around, illuminating a dozen sets of parallel rails with a low viaduct crossing them.

  A goods train passing over this viaduct had skipped the track. Several wagons had jack-knifed, shedding wagonloads of lumber and bails of flax on to the main line below.

  As Marc paused to catch breath, he noted French markings on the engine pulling the derailed cargo train. He’d never heard of a derailed train during his first months in Frankfurt, but there now seemed to be at least one a week and he wondered if they were being sabotaged.

  The idea that the resistance was still active cheered Marc slightly, but the prisoners standing around him were more practically minded: to them bails and logs spilled over train tracks represented nothing but hours of gruelling labour.

  ‘No sleep tonight,’ Laurent said, shaking his head.

  Marc was relieved to have Laurent back in his sights. As the two lads exchanged smiles, a trio of Germans on horseback gathered a few metres ahead, discussing plans with breathless foot guards who’d had to run alongside their prisoners.

  In the background, a scrawny prisoner was being dragged out of the darkness by Fischer. It was the boy Marc had almost tripped over, and as well as the gash in his forehead he had a bloody lip where Fischer had punched him in the mouth. The injustice of it reminded Marc of how powerless prisoners were and made him boil with anger.

  ‘Teams of ten,’ Fischer roared, as he shoved the injured kid away with a kick up the backside. ‘Take the logs away from the main line and up the embankment. The faster you work, the sooner you sleep.’

  There were already a couple of passenger trains blocked in behind the logs, including a Berlin express with irritated passengers staring out the windows.

  The logs were an assortment of rough shapes heading for a sawmill. With no ropes or chains, the gangs of ten struggled to get any kind of grip on the logs, and even when they doubled to teams of twenty it was slow and brutal, taking the huge logs across the railway tracks, then up a steep muddy embankment.

  A crowd of railway officials, police and soldiers gathered, but none of them helped the prisoners. There were more than fifty logs to move and by the time Marc was on his third trip his arms and shoulders were badly strained. He had grazes up his arms and splinters in his hands.

  Once they’d cleared logs lying on their own, the teams had to deal with logs that had settled in dangerously unstable piles. Nobody was surprised when a scream went up and a Dutchman’s ribs got crushed under two tonnes of wood. The prisoners got him out quickly, but he was barely breathing.

  ‘Do that again, it was funny!’ a drunken soldier shouted from above.

  Marc was exhausted and used the rescue of the Dutchman to squat on a rail, studying his splinters and clutching aching sides. Laurent was alongside him.

  ‘Your hands are soft,’ Laurent explained, as he showed Marc dark calloused palms.

  ‘German bastards,’ Marc said angrily, as a couple of men carried the semi-conscious Dutchman up the embankment. ‘Why can’t they use horses to move the logs?’

  Laurent laughed. ‘Why damage a nice horse when you’ve got us?’

  ‘I’m not laughing,’ Marc said. ‘What if it’s you or me trapped under those logs next time?’

  ‘I wonder if this is all there’s ever gonna be,’ Laurent said. ‘If Germany wins, Hitler’s not just gonna say bye-bye, all you lovely prisoners can go home, is he?’

  ‘They won’t win,’ Marc said determinedly, as he thought of something Commander Henderson had once told him. ‘America has over half of the world’s industry. They’re on our side now and they can produce more planes and weapons than the rest of the world put together.’

  Laurent stared at the empty black sky. ‘That may be so, but I’ve seen none of ’em in this neighbourhood.’

  Marc looked around to make sure nobody was in earshot. ‘We could escape,’ he said quietly.

  ‘Dream on,’ Laurent said. ‘The soldiers up on the viaduct would see and shoot us both in the back.’

  Marc felt for the piece of green card in his pocket. He wanted to show Laurent, but it was too risky to pull it out here, and he didn’t want to
spoil it with his bloody hand.

  ‘Not right now,’ Marc said softly. ‘I’ve spent a lot of time in the RLA office. Prisoners get transferred all the time. I’ve worked out the system. I think …’

  Before Marc could finish, Laurent tugged him to his feet. ‘Look sharp, someone’s coming.’

  The man riding towards them wore the grand uniform of the German transport police. As the hoofs of his speckled grey horse crunched in the gravel, the boys braced themselves for a riding crop across the face for sitting down on the job, but the German’s voice was surprisingly warm.

  ‘You two look tired,’ he said, speaking the stilted French that rich German boys learn at school. ‘Do you want to help move some of the flax bails?’

  ‘Yes, boss,’ Laurent said grudgingly.

  ‘Thank you, sir,’ Marc added.

  Laurent scowled at Marc as they hurried across the tracks. ‘Never thank them, you crawler.’

  ‘I’m not crawling,’ Marc said. ‘But I’m more likely to survive ’til sunrise carrying bails than hauling massive logs.’

  ‘He’s feeling guilty ’cos one of us got half killed,’ Laurent said. ‘Give him an hour and he’ll be back to lashing out.’

  ‘What the hell is flax anyway?’ Marc asked, as they started walking.

  Laurent shrugged. ‘They use it to make cloth, I think.’

  While the wood was spilled over the central tracks, the flax bails had tumbled from a pair of flat-bed carriages at the rear of the train. They were the first on the scene, and Marc immediately saw plusses and minuses.

  The big plus was that the bails of flax strands were light compared to giant logs and weren’t going to kill you. On the downside, the bails stank of mould and jumped with fleas; while getting them off the rails involved carrying them through overgrown nettles alongside the tracks and then up a muddy, steeply sloped embankment.

  With no close supervision, Marc and Laurent cleared a path by stamping down nettles, before carrying the first bails up the embankment. They wanted the job to last so that they didn’t get sent back to deal with logs, but they couldn’t work too slow in case it set off a guard.

  By their fifth run, Marc and Laurent were flea-bitten and mud-caked. Three more lads, including Alain, were freed up to carry bails when horses and chains finally arrived to take on the dangerous task of dragging logs out of unstable stacks.

  ‘What a surprise, Marc gets the cushy job again,’ Alain said, when he recognised his nemesis halfway up the embankment with a huge bail balanced across his back. ‘How come so many Germans love you? Are you a snitch, a queer, or both?’

  Marc turned slightly, which wasn’t easy on a muddy slope with a weight on your back. ‘Funnily enough, Laurent and I were just talking about you,’ Marc said. ‘We were wondering if your mother still made good money whoring herself out to the Gestapo?’

  The other two new arrivals half laughed and half gasped as Alain’s eyes bulged.

  ‘You don’t speak about my mother,’ Alain shouted as he started a muddy charge towards Marc. ‘You’re dead, Hortefeux.’

  Laurent shouted from the top of the embankment, ‘You touch my friend, you touch me.’

  Marc felt confident with Laurent on his side. When Alain got close, he let go of the bail, which was heavy enough to sweep Alain’s feet away. Alain crashed in the trackside gravel at the base of the embankment, then sat up to be met by Marc’s muddy boot connecting with the bridge of his nose.

  ‘Like that?’ Marc roared, as he pushed a mound of flax out of the way.

  He landed knees-first on Alain’s chest, and his fist gave Alain a bloody mouth to match his bloody nose.

  From the top of the embankment Laurent could see Fischer and another guard running towards them.

  ‘Marc, back off,’ Laurent shouted.

  But Fischer had his rifle aimed at Marc’s chest before he could make three paces.

  ‘Freeze,’ Fischer shouted. ‘Face me.’

  Marc turned with his hands in a surrender position.

  ‘On your knees,’ Fischer shouted. ‘Hands on head.’

  As Marc’s knees squelched into the mud, Fischer lunged with his rifle butt. It was the kind of blow that could fracture a skull, but luckily the big German misjudged and the swing only glanced Marc’s brow.

  ‘You dare give me trouble twice in one night?’ Fischer shouted, as Marc splashed into the mud with blood gushing from a five-centimetre cut above his eye. ‘You’re in my black book now, Hortefeux, and that’s not a good place to be.’

  CHAPTER THREE

  It was gone 2 a.m. when Marc got back to his bunk. He was woken again at six, by guards booting doors and shouting. Marc could feel the swollen lump and sticky blood over his eye, but had no mirror to see it properly.

  ‘How’s it look?’ he asked.

  Laurent peered down from the bunk above, with what remained of last night’s bread ration softening inside his right cheek. ‘You need a stitch, but you ain’t gonna get one. At least you can keep it clean in your job.’

  Marc had a banging headache. His muscles ached from lifting logs and he needed to pee, but he avoided the scrum in the filthy washroom and fought through bodies and cigarette smoke to be one of the first workers off the boat.

  The sun was barely up and it was drizzling again. Not that Marc minded: The moisture was refreshing after a stifling night aboard the Oper.

  ‘Good morning, Herr Osterhagen,’ Marc said in his politest German, when he reached the guard hut at the bottom of the gangplank.

  Osterhagen was decent. The young guard rarely searched anyone and only acted tough when he had to put on a show for Fischer. He had no obvious ailments, which was curious because healthy German men fought on the front lines, while prisoners were guarded by the old and unfit.

  Marc’s theory was that Osterhagen had friends in high places.

  ‘Looks like you suffered last night,’ Osterhagen said, as he reached into the guard hut and grabbed a filthy jacket with KG2 painted on the back in large red letters.

  ‘Courtesy of Herr Fischer,’ Marc replied.

  ‘He’s a nasty one,’ Osterhagen said, opening a wire gate and letting Marc out as he pulled the jacket up his arms. ‘Keep out of his path.’

  When he’d first arrived in Frankfurt, Marc was surprised that all but the highest-security prisoners were allowed to walk to work with nothing more than a set of initials on their back. Occasionally someone took advantage, but Marc had never heard of anyone getting away.

  Frankfurt was deep inside Germany, it was impossible to travel without documentation, few prisoners spoke German, you needed ration stamps for food and there were security checks everywhere. As a further deterrent, recaptured inmates could expect a beating, followed by reassignment to a coal mine in Silesia.

  Once the gate was out of sight, Marc dived into an alleyway and took a long piss against a wall. After that he set off on a six-minute walk along the riverbank towards the Reich Labour Administration offices in the Großmarkthalle.

  Although it was early, there were plenty of people about, including the unpleasant but familiar sight of young toughs in Hitler Youth uniform. This security detail was all fifteen or sixteen years old and looked ludicrous in white knee socks, short shorts and camel coloured shirts with swastika armbands.

  ‘Where are you going?’ the tallest asked, as they surrounded Marc. One standing behind him drew a long wooden baton and tapped it menacingly in his palm.

  ‘Großmarkthalle,’ Marc said, before tutting. ‘Just like the last five times you’ve stopped me.’

  ‘This little Frenchie has a bad attitude,’ the leader said, and the others all laughed. ‘Show me your prisoner disc.’

  Marc undid a button on his shirt and pulled out the disc. One of the Hitler Youths took out a pencil and wrote his number in a notebook.

  ‘You really stink,’ one lad said. ‘Don’t they teach French boys to wash?’

  ‘You can pass,’ the leader said as he stepped out of Mar
c’s path. ‘But you make our dockside look a mess, we’ll punish you one of these days.’

  This was no idle threat. Hitler Youths dressed like boy scouts, but they were all indoctrinated with racist ideas and the authorities turned a blind eye when they chose to demonstrate their Nazi spirit by intimidating and beating up foreigners.

  As Marc stepped away, the quartet broke into caustic laughter.

  ‘He was trembling,’ one said triumphantly. ‘Skinny French weed.’

  Marc would have loved to have a go back, but that was a losing ticket, so he chewed his lip and contented himself with the thought that they’d all get sent to the Eastern Front as soon as they turned seventeen and hopefully end up on the wrong end of a Russian tank.

  Großmarkthalle was a vast market hall built along the riverbank. The length of three football pitches, it had been built as a wholesale vegetable market, but the building along with surrounding railway sidings and docks had been turned into a transport hub for the military. Großmarkthalle moved troops and prisoners, along with the chemicals and manufactured goods produced in Frankfurt factories.

  A familiar guard let Marc through a gate and he passed into an echoing hall, vaulted with huge concrete ribs thirty metres above the floor. Reich Labour Administration was based in a six-storey office building at the opposite end and Marc walked the length of the hall, dodging tired-looking prisoners rolling tyres and barrels towards a waiting goods train.

  Close to the offices, over a hundred prisoners squatted in a wooden pen, guarded by three Gestapo men with rifles and Alsatian dogs. Six-pointed stars sewn on smart clothes marked the prisoners out as Jews. They were neatly shaved and well fed, because unlike foreign prisoners the Jews were locals who received extra food from non-Jewish friends and female relatives living in the city.

  The Reich Labour Administration offices were on the fifth and sixth floor and the lift was only for Germans. Marc had to clank his way up ten flights of metal stairs. The office was mainly staffed by typists and file clerks, who worked in a brightly-lit pool area, with windows overlooking the River Main to one side and the interior of the market hall on the other.