A Man Without Breath

Everyone in Europe had heard about the Gleiwitz Incident. In August 1939, a group of Poles had attacked a German radio station in Gleiwitz, Upper Silesia, a piece of provocation that was used by the Nazis as justification for the invasion of Poland. Even in Germany there were some who did not believe the Nazi version of what had happened, but Max Schottlander’s report was the first detailed proof of the perfidy of the Nazis. The report demonstrated unequivocally that prisoners from the Dachau concentration camp had been forced to dress up in Polish uniforms and, led by a Gestapo major named Alfred Naujocks, to mount an assault on German territory. The prisoners were all killed by lethal injection and then riddled with bullets to make it look – when the world’s press correspondents were brought in to observe the scene – as though the saboteurs’ attack had been beaten off by brave German soldiers.

Goebbels always had his propaganda aims, and now so had I. History was not going to be prevented from knowing what had really happened at Gleiwitz – not if I had anything to do with this.

Speaking to any of the correspondents assembled in Smolensk wasn’t going to be easy. They were all accompanied by Secretary Lassler from the Foreign Office, Schippert from the Reich Chancellery press department, and Captain Freudeman, a local army officer who, according to Von Gersdorff, was very possibly Gestapo too. I thought my best chance was to speak to one of the reporters the next day, when they visited the temporary laboratory where all the Katyn documents recovered from grave number one were now exhibited; this was the specially glassed-in veranda of the wooden house where the field police was billeted just outside Smolensk, in Grushtshenki – the temporary lab in Katyn Wood having proved unsuitable because of the overpowering smell of the corpses and the swarm of flies that had descended upon the open grave.

I must have lain under that stump like one of those dead Polish officers for ten or fifteen minutes, and perhaps it was this image that changed my mind about what I was proposing to do. I won’t say that I started to see things through the eyes of the dead men in Katyn Wood. Let’s just say that lying there, in what was not much less than an open grave, after someone had tried to put a bullet in my head, I began to see things from a different perspective. I started to feel uneasy about what I was planning to do with Captain Schottlander’s intelligence report. And I remembered something my father had told me once during the course of a very German argument about Marx and history and ‘the world’s spirit on horseback’ – I think that was his phrase. He’d been trying, unsuccessfully, to persuade me not to volunteer for the army in August 1914. ‘History’, he said – with a dismissive inconsequence that stopped me from paying more attention to his words at the time – ‘is all very well, and perhaps it does progress by learning from its mistakes, but it’s people that really matter; nothing ever matters quite as much as them.’ And as I stared up at the treetops, it began to dawn on me that while it was one thing owing a responsibility to history, it was surely something greater when you owed a responsibility to more than four thousand men. Especially when they had been ignominiously murdered and buried in an unmarked grave. Their story deserved to be told, and in a way that could not be denied – as it surely would be if another egregious Nazi lie was now exposed to the world’s press. A genuine effort by the Ministry of Enlightenment and Propaganda to expose the truth of what had really happened at Katyn Wood would certainly be compromised if I revealed the truth of what had really happened at Gleiwitz.

It was dark when I dared to move from the cover of my open grave. By now it was clear that whoever had been shooting at me was long gone, and also that no one else had heard the shots – but for an owl hooting its derision at my own lack of courage, the wood at Krasny Bor was quiet. I might have reported the matter to the field police but I had no wish to waste any more time. So I brushed the earth off my army uniform and went and knocked on her door.

*

Ines greeted my appearance at her door with a mixture of shock and amusement. There was an unlit cigarette in her hand and her boots and medical whites lay on the floor where she had dropped them earlier. She seemed a little less pleased to see me than the previous evening, but that might just have been because she was tired.

‘You look like you need a drink,’ she said, ushering me inside. ‘Correction: you look like you’ve already had two. What did you do? Exhume a dead body with your bare hands?’

‘I was almost a dead body myself. Someone took a shot at me just now.’

‘Anyone you know?’ She closed the door and then looked out of the window.

‘You don’t sound very surprised about it.’