There was another murmur of assent, and they turned away, leaving Alice standing helplessly inside the door. Panic swept in again, this time at the prospect of being an outcast in this place. Shunned by the prisoners, and certainly the focus of the guards’ enmity, since they would know what she had done at Buchenwald.
The thought had barely formed when there was the sound of footsteps outside. The hut door was unlocked and the violet dusklight slanted in, showing up the bare floorboards and the sparse furnishings. But even before that happened, the tiny comforting candle-flames had been quenched and the accusing faces had melted into the darkness.
Four men stood in the doorway, all of them in the dark uniform of the Gestapo. The tallest of them stepped across the threshold, his lips thinning into a fastidious line as the smell of unwashed bodies reached him. A thin scar puckered the skin of his face from the cheekbone to the corner of his mouth. Sabre scar, thought Alice, as the searchlights fell across the man’s face. The duelling scar that was once a mark of honour among German officers. It gave his mouth a twisted, snarling look, so that just for a moment it was as if a wolf had donned a human mask, and as if the mask had slipped a little.
His eyes rested on her, and then in a terse clipped voice he said, ‘Baroness?’ It was not quite a question; it was more as if he was identifying her to himself, but Alice lifted her chin challengingly, and said, ‘Yes.’
‘I am Rudolf Mildner, chief of Gestapo at Kattowicz and head of the political department at Auschwitz. You are to come with us.’ He nodded to the men with him, and two of them grabbed Alice’s arms, so that she was forced to let go of her small bundle of belongings.
‘Where are you taking her?’ demanded the woman who had seemed to be the leader of the hut’s occupants, and this time there was an unmistakable note of protest in her voice. Alice could see now that she was younger than the others, and that she had the distinctive high cheekbones of an Eastern European.
‘She will be punished for her behaviour and her deceit,’ said Mildner. ‘She is an arrogant bitch who attempted to make fools of the Third Reich.’
‘It was not very difficult to do so,’ said Alice softly, and this time there was a definite wave of warmth from several of the women.
But Mildner’s eyes snapped with fury and he came closer, his thin lips twisting into the wolf-snarl again. ‘Tonight, baroness,’ he said, ‘you will be taught a lesson. It will be a lesson you will not forget, and from it you will learn that those caught trying to deceive the Führer receive no mercy.’
Alice was never to know exactly where in the camp the Gestapo took her that night. Auschwitz was too alien for her to work out its layout, and too big. In any case, the world had shrunk to a hopeless misery where time had ceased to exist or even to matter, and where all paths looked the same.
The months inside Buchenwald had taught her that to struggle against the SS or the Gestapo was useless, but she did struggle, although it was a hopeless sobbing struggle and she knew she would not escape.
Mildner’s men took her to a low brick building and pushed her into a long room that looked as if it might be some kind of officers’ mess. There were tables and chairs, and the semblance of a bar at one end with drinks and glasses set out. The curtains were drawn against the night, and an iron stove stood in one corner, roaring its iron-smelling heat into the room. Four Gestapo officers were seated at a table; they turned as Alice was pushed through the door, inspecting her with their eyes.
With a fair assumption of anger, she said to Mildner, ‘Why have you brought me here?’