Chapter Eleven

IF YOU EVER find yourself in the part of the world where france and Germany meet and want your heart broken, drive up the twisting road from the village, through the pine forests and into the foothills of the Vosges mountains.

Sooner or later you will come to an isolated place called Natzweiler-Struthof. It was a Nazi concentration camp, almost forgotten now, never making it on to the misery-with-a-guidebook tours like Auschwitz and Dachau. You come out of the pine trees and at an intersection there is a simple country road sign: one way points to a local bar and the other to the gas chamber. No, I’m not kidding.

Tens of thousands of prisoners passed through the camp’s gates, but that’s not the worst thing. The worst thing is hardly anybody has heard of it – that amount of grief just isn’t big enough to register on the Richter scale of the twentieth century. Another way of measuring progress, I suppose.

I was twelve when I went there. It was summer vacation and, as usual, Bill and Grace had taken a suite at the Georges V hotel in Paris for most of August. They were both interested in art. She liked Old Masters that told people entering the house that this was a woman of wealth and taste. Bill, thank God, was out on the edge – dancing on the edge half the time. He was never happier than when he was finding some new gallery or wandering around a young kid’s studio.

Grace, completely disinterested, had long ago forbidden him to hang any of his purchases, and Bill would wink at me and say, ‘She’s right – whatever it is, you can’t call it art. I call it charity – some people give to the United Way, I support starving artists. ’

But beneath all the jokes, he knew what he was doing. Years later, I realized what an expert eye he had, which was strange, given that he was completely untrained and his family’s only interest had been chemicals. His mother’s name before she married had been DuPont.

The second week we were in Paris, Bill got a call from a guy in Strasbourg who said he had a sheaf of drawings by Robert Rauschenberg dating from when the great Pop artist was an unknown marine. The next day, Bill and I got on a plane with a bag packed for the weekend, leaving Grace to indulge her second great passion – shopping at Hermè s.

And so it was, once Bill had bought the drawings, that we found ourselves in Strasbourg on a Sunday with nothing to do. ‘I thought we might go out to the Vosges mountains, ’ he said. ‘Grace’d probably say you’re too young, but there’s a place you should see – sometimes life can seem difficult, and it’s important to keep things in perspective. ’

Bill knew about Natzweiler-Struthof because of his father – he’d been a lieutenant colonel in the US Sixth Army that had campaigned across Europe. The colonel had arrived at the camp just after the SS abandoned it, and he was given the job of writing a report that found its way to the War Crimes Tribunal in Nuremburg.

I don’t know if Bill had ever read his father’s document, but he found the twisting road without any trouble and we pulled into the car park just before noon, a brilliant summer’s day. Slowly we walked into death’s house.

The camp had been preserved as a French historic site because so many members of the Resistance had died there. Bill pointed out the old hotel outbuilding the Germans had converted into a gas chamber, and a crematorium packed with body-elevators and ovens.

For one of the few times in my life, I held his hand.

We passed the gallows used for public executions, the building where they had conducted medical experiments, and came to Prisoner Barracks Number One, which housed a museum. Inside – among the prisoners’ old uniforms and diagrams of the concentration-camp system – we got separated.

In a quiet corner at the back, near a row of bunk beds where the surrounding ghosts seemed even more tangible, I found a photo displayed on a wall. Actually, there were a lot of photos of the Holocaust, but this was the one that has never left me. It was in black and white and it showed a short, stocky woman walking down a wide path between towering electrified fences. By the look of the light it was late in the afternoon, and in the language of those times she was dressed like a peasant.

By chance there were no guards, no dogs, no watchtowers in the photo, though I’m sure they were there – just a lonely woman with a baby in her arms and her other two children holding tight to her skirt. Stoic, unwavering, supporting their tiny lives – helping them as best as any mother could – she walked them towards the gas chamber. You could almost hear the silence, smell the terror.

I stared at it, both uplifted and devastated by the stark image of a family and a mother’s endless love. A small voice inside, a child’s voice, kept telling me something I’ve never forgotten: I would have such as to have known her. Then a hand fell on my shoulder. It was Bill, come to find me. I could see from his eyes he’d been crying.

Overwhelmed, he indicated the piles of shoes and small items such as hairbrushes that the inmates had left behind. ‘I didn’t realize how powerful ordinary things can be, ’ he said.

Finally, we walked up a path inside the old electrified fence towards the exit gates. As we wound our way up, he asked me, ‘Did you see the part about the gypsies? ’

I shook my head: no.

‘They lost even more in percentage terms than the Jews. ’

‘I didn’t know that, ’ I said, trying to be grown up.

‘Nor did I, ’ he replied. ‘They don’t call it the Holocaust, the gypsies. In their language they have another name for it. They call it the Devouring. ’

We walked the rest of the way to the car in silence and flew back to Paris that night. By some unspoken agreement, we never mentioned to Grace where we had been. I think we both knew she would never have understood.

Months later, a couple of nights before Christmas, I walked down the stairs at the quiet house in Greenwich and was stopped by voices raised in anger. ‘Five million dollars? ’ Grace was saying incredulously. ‘Still, you do what you like, I suppose – it’s your money. ’

‘Damn right it is, ’ he agreed.

‘The accountant says it’s going to an orphanage in Hungary, ’ she said. ‘That’s another thing I don’t understand – what do you know about Hungary? ’

‘Not much. Apparently, it’s where a lot of gypsies came from; it’s a gypsy orphanage, ’ he said, more or less evenly.

She looked at him like he was crazy. ‘Gypsies? Gypsies?! ’

Then they turned and saw me watching from the doorway. Bill’s eyes met mine and he knew that I understood. Porrajmos, as the gypsies say in Romani – the Devouring.

After that Christmas, I enrolled at Caulfield Academy, a really phoney high school that took pride in ‘providing every student with the means to lead a fulfilling life’.

Given the staggering fees, that aspect was probably already taken care of – you had to have about six generations of blue chips behind you even to get in the gate.

The second week I was there we were doing a course to improve our skills at public speaking – only Caulfield Academy could dream up classes like that. The topic someone picked out of a hat was motherhood, and we spent thirty minutes listening to guys talk about what their moms had done for them, which was probably nothing, and funny stuff that happened at the villa in the South of France.

Then I got called on, so I stood up, pretty nervous, and started telling them about pine trees in summer and the long road up into the mountains, and I tried to explain this photo I’d seen and how I knew the mother loved her kids more than anything in the world, and there was this book I’d read by somebody whose name I couldn’t remember and he had this expression ‘sorrow floats’ and that’s what I felt about the photo, and I was trying to tie all this together when people started laughing and asking what I was smoking, and even the teacher, who was a young chick who thought she was sensitive but wasn’t, told me to sit down and stop rambling on and maybe I should think twice before I ran for high elective office, and that made everybody laugh even louder.

I never got up to speak in class after that, not in the five years I was at Caulfield, no matter what amount of trouble it caused. It made people say I was a loner, there was something dark about me, and I guess they were right. How many of them adopted the secret life or ended up killing half as many people as I did?

Here’s the strange thing, though – through all that difficulty and the passage of twenty years, time hasn’t dimmed my memory of that photo. It has only made it sharper – it lies in wait for me just before I go to sleep and, try as I might, I’ve never been able to get it out of my head.