Ninety-one-year-old Gretel Fernsby has lived in the same mansion block in London for decades. She leads a comfortable, quiet life, despite her dark and disturbing past. She doesn't talk about her escape from Germany over seventy years before. She doesn't talk about the post-war years in France with her mother. Most of all, she doesn't talk about her father, the commandant of one of the most notorious Nazi concentration camps.
PART 1
The Devil’s Daughter
LONDON 2022 / PARIS 1946
1
If every man is guilty of all the good he did not do, as Voltaire suggested,
then I have spent a lifetime convincing myself that I am
innocent of all the bad. It has been a convenient way to endure decades
of self-imposed exile from the past, to see myself as a victim of
historical amnesia, acquitted from complicity, and exonerated from
blame.
My final story begins and ends, however, with something as trivial
as a box cutter. Mine had broken a few days earlier and, finding it a
useful tool to keep in a kitchen drawer, I paid a visit to my local hardware
shop to purchase a new one. Upon my return, a letter was
waiting for me from an estate agent, a similar one delivered to every
resident of Winterville Court, politely informing each of us that the
flat below my own was being put up for sale. The previous occupant,
Mr Richardson, had lived in Flat One for some thirty years but
died shortly before Christmas, leaving the dwelling empty. His
daughter, a speech therapist, resided in New York and, to the best of
my knowledge, had no plans to return to London, so I had made my
peace with the fact that it would not be long before I was forced to
interact with a stranger in the lobby, perhaps even having to feign an
interest in his or her life or be required to divulge small details about
my own.
Mr Richardson and I had enjoyed the perfect neighbourly relationship
in that we had not exchanged a single word since 2008. In
the early years of his residence, we’d been on good terms and he had
occasionally come upstairs for a game of chess with my late husband,
Edgar, but somehow, he and I had never moved past the
formalities. He always addressed me as ‘Mrs Fernsby’ while I referred
to him as ‘Mr Richardson’. The last time I set foot in his flat had been
four months after Edgar’s death, when he invited me for supper and,
having accepted the invitation, I found myself on the receiving end
of an amorous advance, which I declined. He took the rejection
badly and we became as near to strangers as two people who coexist
within a single building can be.
My Mayfair residence is listed as a flat but that is a little like
describing Windsor Castle as the Queen’s weekend bolthole. Each
apartment in our building – there are five in total, one on the ground
floor, then two on both floors above – is spread across fifteen hundred
square feet of prime London real estate, each with three
bedrooms, two and a half bathrooms, and views over Hyde Park
that value them, I am reliably informed, at somewhere between
L2 million and L3 million pounds apiece. Edgar came into a substantial
amount of money a few years after we married, an unexpected
bequest from a spinster aunt, and while he would have preferred to
move to a more peaceful area outside Central London, I had done
some research of my own and was determined not only to live in
Mayfair but to reside in this particular building, should it ever prove
possible. Financially, this had seemed unlikely but then, one day,
like a deus ex machina, Aunt Belinda passed away and everything
changed. I’d always planned on explaining to Edgar the reason why
I was so desperate to live here, but somehow never did, and I rather
regret that now.
My husband was very fond of children but I agreed only to one,
giving birth to our son, Caden, in 1961. In recent years, as the property
has increased in value, Caden has encouraged me to sell and
purchase something smaller in a less expensive part of town, but I
suspect this is because he worries that I might live to be a hundred
and he is keen to receive a portion of his inheritance while he is still
young enough to enjoy it. He is thrice married and now engaged for
a fourth time; I have given up on acquainting myself with the women
in his life. I find that as soon as one gets to know them, they are despatched,
a new model is installed, and one has to take the time to
learn their idiosyncrasies, as one might with a new washing machine
or television set. As a child, he treated his friends with similar ruthlessness.
We speak regularly on the telephone, and he visits me for
supper every two weeks, but we have a complicated relationship,
damaged in part by my year-long absence from his life when he was
nine years old. The truth is, I am simply not comfortable around
children and I find small boys particularly difficult.
My concern about my new neighbour was not that he or she
might cause unnecessary noise – these flats are very well insulated
and, even with a few weak spots here and there, I had grown accustomed
over the years to the various peculiar sounds that rose up
through Mr Richardson’s ceiling – but I resented the fact that my
ordered world might be upset. I hoped for someone who had no
interest in knowing anything about the woman who lived above
them. An elderly invalid, perhaps, who rarely left the house and was
visited each morning by a home-help.
A young professional who disappeared on Friday afternoons to her weekend home and returned
late on Sundays, spending the rest of her time at the office or the
gym. A rumour spread through the building that a well-known pop
musician whose career had peaked in the 1980s had looked at it as a
potential retirement home but, happily, nothing came of that.
My curtains twitched whenever the estate agent pulled up outside,
escorting a client in to inspect the flat, and I made notes about
each potential neighbour. There was a very promising husband and
wife in their early seventies, softly spoken, who held each other’s
hands and asked whether pets were permitted in the building
– I was listening on the stairwell – and seemed disappointed when told they
were not. A homosexual couple in their thirties who, judging by the
distressed condition of their clothing and their general unkempt air,
must have been fabulously wealthy, but who declared that the ‘space’
was probably a little small for them and they couldn’t relate to its
‘narrative’. A young woman with plain features who gave no clue as
to her intentions, other than to remark that someone named Steven
would adore the high ceilings. Naturally, I hoped for the gays – they
make good neighbours and there’s little chance of them procreating
but they proved to be the least interested.
And then, after a few weeks, the estate agent no longer brought
anyone to visit, the listing vanished from the Internet and I guessed
that a deal had been struck. Whether I liked it or not, I would one
day wake to find a removals van parked outside and someone, or a
collection of someones, inserting a key into the front door and taking
up residence beneath me.
Oh, how I dreaded it!
“Father had spoken with such confidence of the genetic superiority of our race and of the Führer’s incomparable skills as a military strategist that victory had always seemed assured.”
2
Mother and I escaped Germany in early 1946, only a few months
after the war ended, travelling by train from what was left of Berlin
to what was left of Paris. Fifteen years old and knowing little of life,
I was still coming to terms with the fact that the Axis had been
defeated. Father had spoken with such confidence of the genetic
superiority of our race and of the Führer’s incomparable skills as a
military strategist that victory had always seemed assured. And yet,
somehow, we had lost.
The journey of almost seven hundred miles across the continent
did little to encourage optimism for the future. The cities we passed
through were marked by the destruction of recent years while the
faces of the people I saw in the stations and carriages were not
cheered by the end of the war but scarred by its effects. There was a
sense of exhaustion everywhere, a growing realization that Europe
could not return to how it had been in 1938 but needed to be rebuilt
entirely, as did the spirits of its inhabitants.
The city of my birth had been almost entirely reduced to rubble
now, its spoils divided between four of our conquerors. For our protection,
we remained hidden in the basements of those few true
believers whose homes were still standing until we could be provided
with the false papers that would ensure our safe removal
from Germany. Our passports now bore the surname of Guéymard,
the pronunciation of which I practised repeatedly in order
to ensure that I sounded as authentic as possible, but while Mother
was now to be called Nathalie – my grandmother’s name – I
remained Gretel.
Every day, fresh details of what had taken place at the camps came
to light and Father’s name was becoming a byword for criminality of
the most heinous nature. While no one suggested that we were as
culpable as him, Mother believed that it would spell disaster for us to
reveal ourselves to the authorities. I agreed for, like her, I was frightened,
although it shocked me to think that anyone could consider
me complicit in the atrocities. It’s true that, since my tenth birthday,
I had been a member of the Jungmädelbund, but so had every other
young girl in Germany. It was mandatory, after all, just like being
part of the Deutsches Jungvolk was compulsory for ten-year-old
boys. But I had been far less interested in studying the ideology of
the Party than in taking part in the regular sporting activities with
my friends. And when we arrived at that other place, I had only gone
beyond the fence once, on that single day that Father had brought
me into the camp to observe his work. I tried to tell myself that I had
been a bystander, nothing more, and that my conscience was clear,
but already I was beginning to question my own involvement in the
events I had witnessed.
As our train entered France, however, I grew worried that our
accents might give us away. Surely, I reasoned, the recently liberated
citizens of Paris, shamed by their prompt capitulation in 1940, would
react aggressively towards anyone who spoke as we did? My concern
was proven correct when, despite demonstrating that we had more
than enough money for a lengthy stay, we were refused rooms at five
separate boarding houses; it was only when a woman in Place
Vendôme took pity on us and shared the address of a nearby lodging
where, she said, the landlady asked no questions that we found
somewhere to live. Had it not been for her, we might have ended up
the wealthiest indigents on the streets.
The room we rented was on the eastern part of Île de la Cité and
in those early days I preferred to remain close to home, confining
myself to walking the short distance from Pont de Sully to Pont
Neuf and back again in endless loops, anxious about venturing
across bridges into unknown terrain. Sometimes I thought of my
brother, who had longed to be an explorer, and of how much he
would have enjoyed deciphering those unfamiliar streets, but, at
such moments, I was always quick to dismiss his memory.
Mother and I had been living on the Île for two months before I
summoned the courage to make my way to le Jardin du Luxembourg,
where an abundance of greenery made me feel as if I had
stumbled upon Paradise. Such a contrast, I thought, to when we had
arrived at that other place and been struck by its barren, desolate
nature. Here, one inhaled the perfume of life; there, one choked on
the stench of death. I wandered as if in a daze from the Palais to the
Medici fountain, and from there towards the pool, only turning
away when I saw a coterie of small boys placing wooden boats in the
water, the light breeze taking their vessels across to their playmates
on the other side. Their laughter and excited conversation provided
an upsetting music after the muted distress with which I had become
familiar and I struggled to understand how a single continent could
play host to such extremes of beauty and ugliness.
Extracted from All the Broken Places by John Boyne, out now.
