‘Whoever you are, you must be important to be brought here as a single prisoner,’ said a second voice. ‘The guards usually bring people in by the dozen.’
‘I’ve been brought here from Buchenwald,’ said Alice. ‘I don’t know why I’m here on my own, though.’ She paused, aware of them studying her, trying to decide whether to give them her real name. Would the Buchenwald officials have sent her here as Lucretia von Wolff or as Alice Wilson?
Then the one who had spoken first, said suddenly, ‘I know who you are. You’re that rich baroness – von Wolff, that’s your name. Lucretia von Wolff. You make films – I’ve seen you on them.’
Well, at least that decision’s made for me, thought Alice.
‘In that case,’ said the voice who had asked where she was from, ‘we know all about you. You’re a spy, Madame von Wolff.’ She spat the word out as if it was poison. ‘You spied inside Buchenwald for the Nazis – we heard all about you.’
‘We have our own ways of hearing what goes on in the other camps,’ said a third voice, and there was a murmur of assent, threaded with hostility.
‘We have our own ways of dealing with spies, as well.’
Alice flinched at the angry hatred in their voices, and took an instinctive step backwards before remembering that the door was locked.
‘Are you here to spy on us?’ said a new voice, hard and accusing.
‘I’m not here to spy. I never have spied. I was working against the Germans in Buchenwald—’
‘Oh yes, of course you were,’ said a younger voice sarcastically. ‘Don’t you know all spies say that? “I did it for my own country…I was a double spy, working for Poland, or Czechoslovakia or the Ukraine.” That’s a load of shit, baroness. You had a very profitable little game going on in Buchenwald – we heard about your cosy dinners with Karl Koch and your sherry parties with von Ribbentrop.’
‘And now,’ said the first one, ‘you’re here to spy out our secrets and then go running to the Gestapo with them.’
Fighting to speak calmly, Alice said, ‘You’ve got it all wrong. What can I do – what can I say – to convince you?’ But even if she had not been recognized, her instincts were warning her not to disclose her real identity. She might one day be very glad to have Alice Wilson’s identity to escape into. ‘Truly, I never worked for the Nazis,’ she said.
By now the small flames had burned up a little and she could see the hut more clearly. The narrow beds were arranged in rows along both walls, and at one end was a squat iron stove with a metal cup carefully placed on its surface as if some liquid was being warmed. Several of the dimly seen figures seemed to be huddled around the stove, their thin hands held out to it. Alice, trying to take in as much as she could through the sick waves of exhaustion, had the fleeting impression of some kind of organized grouping, as if turns might be taken to sit around the stove for warmth.
‘I’m here because I cheated the Gestapo,’ she said.
‘How? What did you do to cheat?’
The voice was still hard and uncompromising, as if its owner was prepared to dismiss as lies any kind of answer given, but Alice said as levelly as possible, ‘I supplied false information about escapes from the camp. Several of us did so – we fooled the commandant and made it possible for others to get out.’
‘I say she’s lying,’ said a woman from the stove, who had not spoken yet. ‘Leave her to her own devices. That’s what we do with jackals who snoop for the Gestapo, don’t we?’