Page 57 of The Watchmaker of Dachau

Jan’s bunk was still empty over an hour after dinner. Isaac looked around as if he would find him on another, as if Jan were playing a game with him.

‘He’s gone,’ he said quietly.

Elijah, too tired to respond, climbed into his bed and fell asleep within seconds. Isaac did not know what to do. He asked the others if they had seen Jan, seen where he had gone, but all of them were unconcerned with his questions. Instead, they had heard a rumour – someone had overheard the guards talking about the Americans, how they were close, how bombs were falling all over Germany and they would soon be set free.

Despite the fear he had in his belly, Isaac was drawn to listen to them as they eagerly discussed their freedom.

‘It’s true, it has to be. You know that guard, the one with the scar over his eyebrow?’ someone said.

‘I know him,’ someone chimed in. ‘He’s the angel of death. He likes to take prisoners and torture them. Trust me, I know.’ He raised his jacket to show his bare skin where thick, puckered scars stared angrily at them.

‘Anyway, he stank of alcohol, I could smell it. He was swaying and his eyes were glassy, and he didn’t even notice me when I walked past. He was talking to another guard – the young one with blond hair – he was saying how it was time, that it was going to happen soon and what would become of them? Other camps have been liberated. It is going to happen – I swear to you it is!’

‘If they don’t kill us first,’ a voice from the back said, silencing them all. It was Jan.

Slowly, Jan appeared, like a ghost with sockets that were black where his eyes should be, his face paler than freshly fallen snow.

‘They can’t burn the bodies quickly enough. The trains we came in on, they’re full,’ Jan said.

‘Full with what?’ someone asked.

‘Bodies. The boxcars are full. We moved some today. All day. Carting them there. There’s no food left either. No food.’

Jan came closer, sweat on his brow, and Isaac sat him down and rubbed his back as though he was a child.

‘They said there was little time. The Americans are coming. But I don’t know if we will meet them alive.’

The men were silent, all of them looking at their hands which were not much more than bone. ‘What else did they say?’ someone whispered. ‘Maybe we can escape?’

Jan shook his head. ‘We could try. But how far could we get like this? We are almost dead. We may as well let them end it for us.’ Jan stood and allowed Isaac to lead him to his bed. He lay down, staring at Isaac’s bunk above him.

‘I have to do it again tomorrow. There’s so many of them, Isaac. So many. All one on top of the other so you cannot tell which part belongs to whom. A tangled mess of bodies, Isaac.’

Isaac sat on the edge of Jan’s bunk. Words failed him. There was nothing to say, nothing to take that memory away.

So he sat until Jan fell asleep, then he sat and waited until morning, his mind tumbling over his own memories – of his son, of Hannah – and then the imagining of future memories that he hoped one day to make, if he could survive just a little longer.

Over the next few weeks, more died. From hunger, from torture, from gunshots when they tried to escape. Bodies were piled high in the camp grounds, the buzz of flies a constant hum over them. They were not asked to move them; they were not told anything. It was as though it had always been this way and they had to accept it.

Isaac had not returned to the house – no guard had come to collect him, and no word had come to him that he should have a different role. Instead, work details ceased and they were left to roam the camp, day in and day out, waiting for something to happen, whilst food was thrown at them from carts. If you were lucky and caught something, then you ate; if you did not, then you would starve.

The guards roamed too. Like a pack of hungry lost wolves. Their fingers were trigger happy, their arms filled with random strength to beat anyone who took their fancy.

Isaac stayed in the bunkhouse as much as possible. He spoke to Elijah, to Jan. They made up games to keep their minds active, and counted the time and days as they slowly crept by. He thought often of Anna and wondered if she was at the house or whether she too had been confined to the camp. When there was no game to play, no stories to tell, Isaac lay on his bunk and daydreamed of a life outside the camp. In his daydream he was a little younger, and Anna was by his side, and by his other, a small boy – an age similar to Friedrich – who wanted to mend watches, who wanted to run and play with kites when the wind whipped up.

Then he would shake the silliness from his mind, settling on real memories of his life before – of the person he used to be, of the days spent with his son in his arms, and when he was well enough, their short walks in the meadows, teaching him how to talk, the names of the trees and the birds.

If Isaac was honest with himself, he had always known his son was not for this world. He was fragile from birth, with weak spindly limbs and a cry that was so feeble, it sounded like a newborn kitten.

But his son had been full of life – full of questions, his eyes roaming over everything, wanting to know more, see more. When he had met Friedrich and the boy had asked questions, his keenness to have someone to talk to, his desire to know what else was happening in the world, had reminded Isaac of his son. And with that, a part of him, the part of loving someone, caring for someone, which he had shut down after both his son and Hannah had died, woke up.

Although the memory of the shed, of the watches, of the Bechers, was becoming ever more distant with each day that passed, he still thought of Friedrich. He worried for him, and wished he could talk to him and tell him that everything would be all right.

One afternoon, Isaac sat on a patch of grass, watching the trees rustle in the wind just beyond the fences of the camp. They were so near, so near and yet so far from him. He coughed, feeling it swell in his chest, his ribs hurting with each movement. It was getting worse.

‘Schüller?’ A guard stood before him. ‘I need you to come with me.’

Isaac stood, then had to wait a moment for blood to find its way around his body, air into his lungs. He shuffled after the guard who walked him to the Bechers’ home, his gun trained on Isaac’s back as if he could run away at any moment.