The Outsider: My Life in Intrigue

Dancing till dawn was not quite the Communist way, and at about midnight a voice announced that the joint would close in a few minutes. I paid up and we went to the lobby. If matters were to go further, as I much wished they could, there was no question of my suite upstairs. Each landing had a gorgon behind a desk outside the elevators, noting comings and goings. Western decadence was not on the menu. But I had a car, even if it was an East German horror. And I knew of some lakes outside the city. To my surprise, my suggestion of a night drive was accepted.

I collected my car keys, winked at Stanley, who beamed back, escorted Jana to the Wartburg, and we set off. By then I knew Prague well enough to weave and swerve my way out of downtown, through the suburbs and into the countryside. After thirty minutes, I found the lake. Taking a plaid blanket from the boot, we walked to the water’s edge. It was two a.m., but still stiflingly hot. So we stripped down and went into the cool water naked.

We skinny-dipped for half an hour before climbing out and spreading the rug in the long, warm grass. Then, like any healthy young animals, we made love; rather extensively, to my recall. I used to smoke in those days, and after exhausting ourselves, I lay on my back with Jana half-asleep on my left shoulder, watching plumes of blue smoke drift up into the starry sky. Then a remarkable thought occurred to me.

I had never driven through Redland, apart from those times in East Germany when I had deliberately shaken my Stasi “tail” just to annoy them, without the ever-present black-windowed Tatra saloon slotting in two or three cars behind. Even at night, if there were not enough other cars to permit that, and the goons dropped back, pretending not to be there, you could always see the wash of their headlights in the rearview mirror. Except that night: no headlights.

I must have moved in my surprise

, for a sleepy voice in the crook of my left arm asked, “What’s the matter?” I explained, adding: “Whatever happened to the StB?”

And the sleepy voice replied, “You just made love to it.” As I drifted off to sleep, I recall thinking, “If this is the Czech secret police, bring it on.” Well, we all have to make a living.

BEER WITH A CAMP GUARD

Weimar is a small, charming town steeped in culture. Composers and writers of world renown worked there centuries ago. But outside Weimar is a hill and on top of the hill is a wood. Unless things have changed, the trees comprising the wood are beeches.

Beech in German is buchen, and a wood is called a wald. So when the Nazis built a concentration camp in the middle of it they called it Buchenwald, a place of unredeemed horror. After 1949, the East German government decided to preserve it as a place for public visitation. While I was posted there, I motored south from Berlin to see it.

Of course it was a weirdly horrible way to spend a day. There was a car park outside and a place to pay the visitor fee just outside the main gate. Just about everyone else streaming through the gate surmounted by the swastika was in an organized group, quickly taken in tow by the professional guides. Solitaries were rare, for without a running commentary, much would remain unexplained.

There was a school party just ahead of me, so I attached myself to it, and no one seemed to notice. Perhaps the officials thought I was a teacher and the teachers thought I was on the camp staff. I could hear the accompanying lecture quite clearly, and of course understand it. It was all minutely organized along the permitted paths that made up the tour.

We were led past the parade square, with its flogging posts and gallows, through a sample hut (the liberating Allies of 1945 had burned most of them down, as they were infected by disease). We were taken to the crematorium, where the constant stream of corpses had been disposed of, and through the “medical” laboratory where Nazi pseudo-doctors had experimented on living victims. The watchtowers looked down over all of us, only the old machine guns had been removed.

By rote repetition, the commentary was word-perfect, so eventually it became just a drone without inflection or expression. The children were awed into silence as they listened to the explanation of what had been done there.

I noticed that the guides never used the word Nazi and never, ever the word German. Those responsible had been the “Fascists,” even though the Fascists were the Italians. The strong impression being dunned into the children’s brains was that the Fascists had in a way, as if from outer space, simply arrived, performed their inhumanities, and then been hounded out to take up residence in their new natural home, Bonn, the capital of West Germany. No one queried this or mentioned that it was actually the Americans who liberated Buchenwald, not the Russians. The whole lecture was a communist tour de force.

By the time it was over and I could escape, thoroughly depressed, back to my car, dusk was falling. At the bottom of the hill, on a side road, there was a country inn, or gasthof. I pulled in, parked, went into the bar, and ordered a stein of beer. I sat alone; I wanted to think over what I had seen. It was probably similar to that flickering film my father had seen at the War Office in 1945. He had told me about it; I had read about it, but had never actually seen it (or the remaining evidence of it). Until now. Then there was a power failure, not unusual in rural East Germany.

The landlord came over with a candle. There was only one other drinker in the bar, a middle-aged man a few tables away, glowering over his beer. The host asked if I minded if he joined me to share the candle and relieve the need for two candles. I shrugged and the other drinker came to sit opposite me. The atmosphere by candlelight and with the concentration camp on the hill above us was predictably gloomy, like something from an old Dracula movie.

My new companion did not seem to be drawn from the professional classes; workingman’s rough clothes, a pocked and coarse face. After a while in silence, he asked, “Wo kommst du her?” (Where do you come from?)

He used the familiar du form of address, a familiarity that can be either rudeness or an attempt at camaraderie. He had heard me order in German, so I supposed he meant from which East German city. I did not feel like being German at that moment, so I replied, “Aus London.”

He stared at me across the beer glasses, then shook his head. I must be joking, trying to impress.

“Glaub’ ich nicht,” he said. (Don’t believe it.)

Sufficiently irritated, I flicked my blue British passport across the table. He examined it, compared photo and face, and slid it back with something between a mocking smile and a sneer. He jerked his head toward what lay out in the darkness, atop the hill.

“Und was denkst Du?” (So, what do you think?)

We both carried on in German. There was something I was beginning not to like.

“What the hell do you think I think?”

He shrugged again, dismissively.

“What happened happened.”

It was a long shot but I asked it anyway.

“Were you there? In the old days?” I did not mean as an inmate, I meant on the staff. He shook his head, then confirmed my suspicion.

“Not that one.”