The Odessa File

They meant very little. There was something about Rosenheim, which he knew to be a small village in Bavaria, perhaps the place she had been born. Something else about ‘all dressed in white, so pretty, so very pretty’. Then there was another jumble of words that meant nothing.

Miller leaned closer.

‘Fräulein Wendel, can you hear me?’

The dying woman was still muttering. Miller caught the words ‘each carrying a prayer book and a posy, all in white, so innocent then’.

Miller frowned in thought before he understood. In delirium she was trying to recall her first Communion. Like himself, she had once been a Roman Catholic.

‘Can you hear me, Fräulein Wendel?’ he repeated, without any hope of getting through. She opened her eyes again and stared at him, taking in the white band around his neck, the black material over his chest and the black jacket. To his astonishment she closed her eyes again and her flat torso heaved in spasm. Miller was worried. He thought he had better call the doctor. Then two tears, one from each closed eye, rolled down the parchment cheeks. She was crying.

On the coverlet one of her hands crawled slowly towards his wrist, where he had supported himself on the bed while leaning over her. With surprising strength, or simply desperation, her hand gripped his wrist possessively. Miller was about to detach himself and go, convinced she could tell him nothing about Klaus Winzer, when she said quite distinctly: ‘Bless me, Father, for I have sinned.’

For a few seconds Miller failed to understand, then a glance at his own chest-front made him realise the mistake the woman had made in the dim light. He debated for two minutes whether to leave her and go back to Hamburg or whether to risk his soul and have one last try at locating Eduard Roschmann through the forger. He leaned forward again.

‘My child, I am prepared to hear your confession.’

Then she began to

talk. In a tired, dull monotone, her life story came out. Once she had been a girl, born and brought up amid the fields and forests of Bavaria. Born in 1910, she remembered her father going away to the first war, and returning three years later after the Armistice of 1918, angry and bitter against the men in Berlin who had capitulated.

She remembered the political turmoil of the early twenties and the attempted putsch in nearby Munich when a crowd of men headed by a street-corner rabble-rouser called Adolf Hitler had tried to overthrow the government. Her father had later joined the man and his party and by the time she was twenty-three the rabble-rouser and his party had become the government of Germany. There were the summer outings of the Union of German Maidens, the secretarial job with the Gauleiter of Bavaria and the dances with the handsome, blond young men in their black uniforms.

But she had grown up ugly, tall, bony and angular, with a face like a horse and hair along her upper lip. Her mousy hair tied back in a bun, in heavy clothes and sensible shoes, she had realised in her late twenties there would be no marriage for her, as for the other girls in the village. By 1939 she had been posted, an embittered and hate-filled woman, as a wardress in a camp called Ravensbrück.

She told of the people she had beaten and clubbed, the days of power and cruelty in the camp in Brandenburg, the tears rolling quietly down her cheeks, her fingers gripping Miller’s wrist lest he should depart in disgust before she had done.

‘And after the war?’ he asked softly.

There had been years of wandering, abandoned by the SS, hunted by the Allies, working in kitchens as a scullery-maid, washing dishes and sleeping in Salvation Army hostels. Then in 1950 she met Winzer, staying in a hotel in Osnabrück while he looked for a house to buy. She had been a waitress. He bought his house, the little neuter man, and suggested she come and keep house for him.

‘Is that all?’ asked Miller when she stopped.

‘Yes, Father.’

‘My child, you know I cannot give you absolution if you have not confessed all your sins.’

‘That is all, Father.’

Miller drew a deep breath.

‘And what about the forged passports? The ones he made for the SS men on the run.’

She was silent for a while, and he feared she had passed into unconsciousness.

‘You know about that, Father?’

‘I know about it.’

‘I did not make them,’ she said.

‘But you knew about them, about the work Klaus Winzer did.’

‘Yes.’ The word was a low whisper.

‘He has gone now. He has gone away,’ said Miller.

‘No. Not gone. Not Klaus. He would not leave me. He will come back.’