‘No, you haven’t.’
‘Well, how many other seventeen-year-olds would quote King Lear? Why aren’t you staying out late and getting illegally drunk and listening to too-loud pop music like the rest of your generation?’ She smiled at him.
‘I don’t know. I don’t care. I do stay out late sometimes, though.’
‘I’m aware of it,’ she said, dryly.
‘Tell me about Buchenwald. Didn’t you try to escape? I would have done.’
‘At first I thought I would,’ said Alice. ‘I even thought it would be easy. All through that train journey I planned what I would do and how I would get away.’
‘To find Conrad and Deborah.’ This was entirely understandable. ‘So there you were on the train trying to plan an escape.’
‘Not just precocious, persistent as well,’ said Alice. ‘But yes, I was on the train, and I thought about escaping all through the hours and hours of jolting and the biting cold, with people being sick on the wooden floors from terror, or relieving their bladders in front of everyone simply because there was nowhere else to do it. Captivity isn’t romantic or noble, Michael, not like it is in stories. It isn’t the Prisoner of Zenda, or the rightful heir to a kingdom being shut in a stone cell by a usurper and then rescued in a swashbuckling fight. The reality’s squalid and horrible and dehumanizing – the Nazis loved the dehumanizing part, of course; it fitted very neatly with their propaganda and their murderous schemes against the Jews. Even so, all through that journey I clung on to how I would find a way to fool them and outwit the SS, and how I would cheat Leo Dreyer and get away—’
‘But you didn’t?’
‘No. There were escapes from the camps, of course, and quite a lot of them were from Buchenwald. Towards the end of the war there was an underground resistance network that smuggled people out. But in those early months it was a very difficult camp to escape from.’
‘What made it so difficult?’
Alice paused, as if arranging the memories in her mind. ‘All the concentration camps were dreadful places,’ she said. ‘You can’t believe how dreadful they were. Most of them were death camps – “Rückkehr unerwünscht” they were labelled. That means, “Return not desired”. Death camps, you see. Buchenwald wasn’t that; but it was “Vernichtung durch arbeit”. Extermination by work.’
Again the pause. Then, ‘Originally it was intended for political prisoners,’ she said. ‘So groups of people were taken into nearby factories or quarries in Weimar and Erfurt, and made to work there, sometimes for twelve hours at a time.’
‘Did you have to do that?’
‘Yes, for a while. I hoped I could escape that way, but the guards were with us all the time, and it was impossible. There were roll calls twice a day – sometimes three times – and the SS patrols were everywhere. Anyone caught trying to escape was shot at once.’ She paused again, and then said, ‘To me – to all of us – Buchenwald was an outpost of hell.’