Into the Darkest Day

Guy looked at him bleakly. “What do you think I’m saying, son? Matthew was a Jew, the same as me. His family were Jews. He left his mother and a couple of brothers and sisters—I can’t remember how many, but a fair few—back in Germany. His father had already died, that I remember. Beaten to death during Kristallnacht. Matthew’s mother hid him in a cupboard and he escaped the next day.”

Abby let out a soft gasp of horror. She’d heard of such things, of course; she’d studied the Holocaust in history class and read novels about it and seen Schindler’s List; she’d been to the museum in DC and had watched documentaries about survivors, and yet, even so, she’d never heard or felt it as starkly as that, the reality of it right there in the room with them.

Guy nodde

d somberly, accepting their reactions. “You couldn’t imagine how it was, now. We couldn’t even imagine it back then. We’d heard things, of course. Rumors. Whispers. Just a bit here and there—trains going east, ghettoes put up, stories of dark things that no one really liked to say or even think about. We didn’t credit any of it, not really. We couldn’t. Because to believe it…” He shook his head slowly. “It was simply too terrible to think about. Even though Matthew and I both saw some terrible things before we left Germany before the war, we still hoped it wouldn’t get as bad as that. That it couldn’t.”

“I can understand that,” Abby said quietly. She paused, before continuing hesitantly, “So Matthew’s family…”

“They’d been left behind in some little town in what was part of Germany but is now Poland—Posen, the province was, although I can’t remember the name of the town. He got out—took him months of hiding and finally getting passage on a Spanish freighter to America. He didn’t talk about it much at all, but I know it ate at him, especially as we got closer to Germany, and then right into the heart of it all. He wanted to find out what had happened to his family. It drove him more than anything else.” He paused, his face seeming to have collapsed in on itself in sadness. “And then… then we came to Wobbelin.”

There was a note of finality to Guy’s voice that Abby didn’t understand.

“I haven’t heard of that,” Simon said and Guy let out a gusty sigh that seemed to come from the depths of his weary being.

“We’d been through a lot by then. The drop into Normandy, the disaster of the Waal bridge, the horror of Ardennes—the Battle of the Bulge as they called it later—and then that final push into Germany. The war was almost over, we were so sure, it was as if we could taste it. Abandoned Panzers, artillery and ammunition just left in rusty heaps on the side of a road, Dutch and then even German villagers welcoming us with open arms, kissing us on our cheeks. One hundred and fifty thousand German soldiers surrendered in a single morning. We saw them going by in droves, trying to escape the Soviets. They were more frightened of the Soviets than us. We knew it was only a matter of time, and not much at that.”

“So… Wobbelin?” Simon let the words hang in the air, a question, an admission of ignorance. Abby had never heard the name before either.

Guy’s hand trembled as he covered his eyes briefly, and Abby reached out and touched his other hand lightly, a gesture of comfort she felt compelled to give. He dropped his hand from his eyes and gave her a kindly, watery smile. “I didn’t go to see it. I… I couldn’t. Three miles away and we could smell the place.” He gave a little shudder. “That was bad enough. You just knew… and yet you didn’t. You couldn’t. You could never imagine. Never guess.”

“It was a concentration camp,” Simon surmised softly.

Guy nodded. “Matthew was determined to see it for himself. A couple of them went. Intelligence officers. They had to. But Matthew…” He shook his head. “He wanted answers, and I’m sorry to say he found some of them there. He wasn’t the same, after. He didn’t say a word of it to me, not one word, but he wasn’t the same. I remember he came back into the camp and it was as if he was… as if he was blind. He didn’t look anyone in the eye, just walked straight past everyone as if they didn’t exist, right to the canteen and got himself a shot of whiskey. Downed it in one go, and then another, and no one stopped him. I went to ask him how he was, but he didn’t answer. He didn’t even look at me. And, to my shame, I let him be. Looking back, I wish I hadn’t, but I was scared.” Guy hung his head, the shame he still felt like a shroud over him. “I didn’t want to know. I didn’t want to hear. Of course I did, we had to, later. A few days later, we had a funeral service for everyone who died there. We made the townspeople dig the graves. They’d known all along, of course, and had done nothing.” He swallowed. “So many graves… I’d seen a lot in the war, but I’d never seen anything like that. I remember, one of the Nazi officers was smoking while the chaplain gave his address. And Matthew—” He stopped.

Simon leaned forward. “And Matthew?”

“He took out his pistol and pressed it to the man’s forehead. That wasn’t as much of a shock as it might sound—tempers ran high and those Nazi officers were right bastards.” He shot Abby an apologetic smile. “Sorry, miss.”

“Don’t be,” she answered. “They were that and more.”

“We were tough with them. Too tough sometimes, but still. You couldn’t help but feel they deserved it. But that time… I was standing near him, and I saw his finger tremble on the trigger. I realized he wasn’t just doing it for show, a fit of temper, nothing more—he was really struggling. He wanted to kill that arrogant SOB. I couldn’t blame him, but I also knew he couldn’t do it. I told him to back off, and Matthew looked at me then like I was the one he wanted to shoot in the head. For a second I actually thought he might, but then he put away his pistol and the Nazi stamped out his cigarette, thank God. I don’t know what would have happened if he hadn’t.”

“My goodness.” Abby could picture it all, as clear as a photograph, or a film. She could feel the tension, and she had an urge to shiver.

“I’ve never even heard of Wobbelin, I’m ashamed to admit,” Simon said quietly.

Guy nodded in understanding. “It wasn’t one of the big ones, like Auschwitz or Dachau. They’d only set it up a couple of months before, as a—well, as a holding pen, as awful as that sounds. Bringing the survivors of the other camps to one place. They were trying to get rid of the evidence, by that point, of what they’d done.” His face twisted with remembered bitterness and even hatred. “They might have acted as if they had all the answers, their damned Final Solution, but they knew how evil they were, and they tried to hide it from the rest of the world, damn them to hell and back.”

Abby swallowed. Her throat felt thick and tears pricked her eyes, and she wasn’t quite sure why. She’d heard horrible stories before, and yet this only felt far more personal, far more real. She wasn’t related to Matthaus Weiss; she’d barely heard of him, had only seen the one photograph, in front of the Mathers’ house. And yet she felt almost unbearably moved by Guy’s story, by Matthew’s anguish.

“So did Matthew find out what happened to his family?” Simon asked after a moment. “Had they been in the camps?”

Guy shook his head. “I never found out about that. He never told me, and the truth is, we barely spoke after that terrible day, the day of the funeral. He was angry at first, and then everything was happening all at once—Hitler killed himself, and then the Germans were surrendering, and Matthew was seconded somewhere else quite quickly, to interrogate some Nazis. I’m sorry to say I never saw him again. None of the Ritchie Boys kept in touch, as far as I know. It just wasn’t done. We’d had a different war than everyone else, being both Germans and Jews.” He smiled sadly. “I wish we had stayed in touch. It’s good talking about these things—good, but hard.”

“So you don’t know what happened to Matthew after the war? If he came back to America, or…?”

Guy shook his head. “I don’t know a thing.”

“What about Tom Reese?”

“Tom Reese…” Guy scratched his chin thoughtfully. “Like I said, I wasn’t friends with him, although he and Matthew stuck together a bit. They were dating a pair of sisters, as I recall. British girls.”

“Sisters?” Simon perked up at that. “Do you mean Sophie and Lily Mather? My grandmother is Sophie.”’

“Those may have been their names. I’m afraid I didn’t pay close attention, and Matthew didn’t tell me about his love life, or anything else. But even so, I could tell he was awful sweet on her.”

“And Tom and Sophie?” Abby asked after a moment. “Do you know what happened to them?”