‘I cheated him, of course,’ said Alice, her eyes full of memories that seemed to be spilling out into the warm safe room, like ghosts from old black and white newsreels.
‘How did you dare?’ said Michael, coming up out of this sinister world where tanks drove arrogantly through city streets, and people were shut away behind barbed wire and threatened by black-snouted machine-guns. But even as he said it, he knew that of course she had dared; she would have dared anything.
‘It was not as dangerous as it sounds,’ said Alice. ‘There was indeed an underground organization being formed in Buchenwald – the commandant had been right about that, although it was so new and so tentative it was as insubstantial as a spider-web. But it was a web that was being spun very determinedly indeed, and even a hint of its existence alerted the SS sufficiently to recruit spies on their own account.’
‘And they thought you would be one of the spies?’
‘Yes. They had assumed, you see, that I would do anything for food and warmth and all the other things. They thought they were dealing with Lucretia von Wolff, who was luxury-loving and pampered, and that was their mistake. They didn’t know that Lucretia was just a smokescreen, or that I was far better equipped to cope with the harsh regime than they could imagine. I had started life as a kitchenmaid in the big house in England – I had been used to getting up at half past five in the depths of a freezing winter and raking out fires and kitchen ranges, and pumping cold water from a well in the yard. And when I was promoted to be Nina Dreyer’s maid, there was still all the fetching and carrying, and sitting up until three or four in the morning to help her undress after a party or a ball.’ She paused, and then said, ‘Also there had been those months of living rough in Vienna’s back streets. I believed that if I could survive that, I could survive practically anything.’
‘But to deceive the Nazis. The Gestapo—’ The words had been coined long before Michael was born, but they still carried their own dread. Iron armies reaching out their iron talons to victims, inflicting such damage and such suffering on those victims that they would never forget, not for an instant…
‘When it came to it, they were easily deceived,’ Alice said. ‘I enlisted two or three of the other women – people I could trust – and between us we concocted various stories that we thought the Nazis would swallow. The discovery of a planned break-out from one hut or another. False papers being prepared somewhere else. At careful intervals I carried these stories to the commandant, and he believed them. He was a stupid man, Karl Koch. Much of the time he was drunk or gambling, so that made him easy to hoodwink.’
‘Didn’t he find out you were feeding him false information?’
‘Not for a long time. We were very careful not to put anyone in danger with the information we gave him, but we managed to keep attention away from the real plotters.’
‘Tell me about the real plotters.’ Again, Alice had evoked the people of the stories, so that it was easy to see the little groups of ragged women huddling together in wooden huts, planning and whispering, their thin faces intent and serious.
‘They were the ones who really were getting people out to freedom. It was all kept very simple though – mostly prisoners being smuggled out in laundry baskets or disguised as workmen. We didn’t build aeroplanes out of matchsticks like the officers in Colditz Castle, or dig tunnels under stoves or dress up as German officers. And not all of the ones who escaped from Buchenwald made it to safety. But some did. Some reached Switzerland or England. Our successes were pitifully few, but the fact that we had successes at all gave us hope. They gave us something to work for.’