Short Circuit
He liked to give us a sporting chance to escape from Karićne, provided that he always won. I was selected to help him devise the system that helped him do so. Until I was co-opted, he didn’t always win and he didn’t like that. Until I helped him, his system rarely killed anyone, although it could burn off a couple of fingers or toes.
The problem is that electricity has to find a path from the live conductor, through the heart and back to the neutral. So if you stand on the ground and grab the electrified wire with your right hand, the route taken could burn through the arm, armpit, groin, right leg and foot, leaving the heart or brain untouched. That’s how it worked with Hermann’s system originally; it also fused the camp lights at the same time.
It’s the voltage that’s critical. A tiny current will stop the heart beating in a fraction of a second, but it can’t get there without enough voltage to push it along. At least 3000 volts to be certain.
That’s the design fault with the electric chair. Instead of the current going straight to the heart, the electrodes on the head directs it to the brain until it fries. It takes about five or six minutes
Hermann
Of course I never called him that to his face. Hauptmann Kauffmann I called him. With my hat off and not looking directly at him, in case some of my Jewish germs might damage his stunning looks and steady gaze.
He was a fine looking man. Trim black uniform, service hat peaking eight or nine centimetres above his light blue eyes and long aquiline nose. Straight it was and delicate, perhaps a little too much so for a man. Not like our hooked Jewish noses, nor even like Hitler’s, which, truth be told, looked like a bit like a small leberwurst; Hermann’s was elegant, light pink and narrow. Ein wirklicher Aryanische Nase .
“Here, Goldenarse or what ever your name is. You’re an electrical engineer. Tell me why every time one of you vermin falls onto the fence, it makes all the lights go out but it doesn’t kill him. Answer me that, Herr Einstein, and you might live to a ripe old age.”
“Excuse me Herr Hauptmann the…”
“Stand to attention when you speak to me, you stupid Yid!” he shouted.
“Excuse me Herr Haputmann” I began again, this time standing rigidly to attention and gazing at a point just to the right of his shoulder. “I think we need to have two separate circuits. One of high voltage and low current, and the other…”
“Stop trying to teach me my job, you lump of shit. Go with Corporal Gunther to the guard room and sort it out. If it works, you can have double rations for a week. If it doesn’t, someone else will fix it, and you’ll be first on the wire to test it. Now fuck off.”
He gave me a swift rap across the face with his swagger stick, turned smartly on his polished heel and left me with the corporal. “Keep at it, Günter” I said silently to him as we marched off to the guard room. “Look at Hitler. He used to be a corporal.”
A few days later Hermann kept his promise and gave me extra rations. At least my system was quick.
Miriam
Until she was 11, Miriam had never seen a house with a roof. She assumed, as she was chased from one bombed village to another, across borders, across barbed wire fences, across tarmacs or through the sewage pipes, that Eastern Europe was an immense plain covered with millions of houses, none of them with a roof. She had slept in many of them, snuggled up tightly to a wall or corner covered with rags or papers but always opens to the elements.
I could see the fear and surprise in her face when she came into our office at the Resettlement Centre in Hamburg. Fear that I was going to shoo her over another border, and surprise (I learnt later) that there seemed to be an object between her and the sky, sometimes known as a roof.
She spoke to me —eventually — in a mixture of tongues; Russian, German, Polish, Czech and the Language of Lamentation, Yiddish. She had been brought into the centre by one of workers, Fat Shoshana, almost thin enough to enter a room through a crack under the door.
Fat Shoshanna told me she’d seen Miriam scavenging in bins outside on the barracks of the Royal Lancashire Fusiliers, watched speculatively by the two sentries on guard duty. She didn’t understand their banter, Shoshana told me, but she knew the meaning, so with a little bit of wheedling, a little bit of chocolate and a little bit of smiling, she managed to cajole Miriam to come down the road to the Centre.
I didn’t know if Miriam would stay; she could walk away whenever she wanted, but she was a realist. There was food three times a day, women who could help guide her through her first periods, and – a silly thing to say – a roof over her head. Silly, because she slept outside for a few weeks. She would drag her mattress into the yard, cover it with newspapers or even a blanket or two and sleep underneath it, with a piece of bread or a chicken bone clutched tightly to her chest.
It was good practice for her. Our group, Miriam amongst them, had to wait 48 hours without shelter on a Cyprus beach for a Greek freighter to take us through the British blockade around Haifa. In the day time we had to stay hidden under the scrub, and in the old containers and disabled tanks scattered along the beach, and at night we just sat on the beach waiting, sharing out the little bit of water and bread we’d brought with us.
This little bit of a boat, 20m long and 5m wide, big enough to hold just two or three ton of fish, turned up just before dawn, two days late. It stank of dead fish and stale urine, but we were happy enough the wade out for a few meters and swim or paddle the rest, just to get off that hot and arid beach.
There was no food or water on board.
You might think that if you’re paid a couple of thousand dollars each to take a bunch of immigrants for a two-day voyage, you could manage to get something for them to eat and drink on board. Mattresses, pillows, blankets – don’t bother. We were only Displaced Persons. But even DPs need water and food.
So we argued and shouted as we pulled away from the land, staggering from side to side against the rusty walls of the hold as the swell rook hold.
We anchored a few kilometres from the shore, and we sent the captain, fat, oily and filthy, in a rowboat with two of our toughest men – they looked like adolescents beside the corpulent captain – to buy food. We sent Miriam with them to buy medical supplies and sanitary towels, giving her the last few dollars the Agency had given us for the trip.
She didn’t return.
I met her about ten or twelve years later in the Dos Amigos, just off the quayside in Caracas. It was the 8th October, 1958. I always remember the 8th October. It’s the Day of Saint Agnes, Patron saint of Chastity and Girl Scouts. We often prayed to her at sea to send us a few girl scouts.
Miriam hadn’t grown much taller, but her hair was dyed blonde, and bright-red lipstick covered her lips by a margin of about a eighth of an inch all round. Face powder lay in the crevices of her face like mould in Athletes Foot. She wore a low cut off-white blouse; wrinkles hung across her chest like the limp springs of a chest expander.
“’Ello darlink,” she said sliding into the seat next to mine. “Buy me drink?”
I recognized her generically, but not personally — until a few hours later. I’ve been in a hundred bars from Vizagabatan to Kudumatsu, where there are always a few women dressed like her, smelling of sweat and booze, and trying to turn a trick with sailors who are so drunk or so lonely, that they’d fuck a lamppost given the chance.
I had qualified as an AB by then. Able Seaman. One step up from DP. I’d carried oranges from Valencia to Liverpool, iron ore from Dalien to Bombay, and crude oil from Galvaston to Klang. I was a good at my job, and they’d often tell me I should go in for a Third Officer’s Ticket, but the word “officer” made my stomach go cold. It sounded too much like “offizier”. I would never have been able to issue orders or deal with electrical equipment. I couldn’t even bring myself to touch a light switch; I would rather blunder about in an unlit cabin than turn the lights on.
I could never have worn a uniform either.
But as plain able seaman, I could manage my job quite well. I was a steady helmsman, I could tie up a 40 000 ton tramp steamer with just two other men, row a bum boat dead straight in heavy swell, paint a bulwark without drips and stow cargo as watertight as a duck’s arse. But I couldn’t bear to touch a switch. To cover myself I told my mates I liked sitting in the dark.
It’s not so strange; I once met a woman who had a phobia about buttons. I thought about marrying her. We’d have been a bit like Jack Spratt and his wife. She’d turn the lights on and I’d undo her buttons. But I didn’t. Get married that is. I’m better off at sea. A lamppost in every port.
I bought Miriam a drink, a bright green cocktail in a plastic glass with a limp straw. Of course it was coloured water; she would get a percentage of the cost, and good luck to her. But I just caught the sound of a Yiddish curse with a Polish accent, barely audible, as she put the straw into her mouth, and I suddenly remembered this foul-mouthed innocent, filthy young kid who came into the resettlement centre 12 years ago.
Many of the women DPs ended up as prostitutes scattered across Europe and South America. The Pope was helpful in this arrangement. Not directly. His Holiness only facilitated the movement of Nazi war criminals to South America, through a network of pious Brothers who were always at hand to succour the poor and help the innocent. Also his abhorrence of condoms kept the market turning over.
This influx of Nazis was followed by displaced women and girls cajoled or press-ganged from Europe. There were thousands of them at the end of the war with no money no home and no passports. In South America, they were short of young women, and a light skin was an advantage.
After bearing five or six children the women were less saleable, and new ones had to be found. Also many died as a result of abortions or VD, but not before distributing it impartially amongst the high and low.
Miriam took me home that night. It was a garden shed in a tired suburb of Caracas. The German owner of the house had worked Miriam for a few years until she had stopped becoming profitable, and more from inertia than compassion allowed her to stay in the garden shed. But it was to his advantage too. He was desperately ill, she told me, so a bit of shopping and a bit of housework was always helpful.
I looked at him through the bungalow window. I saw an old, haggard man, wearing barge-sized slippers, a greasy undershirt and pee-stained khaki shorts. He had a few wisps of blonde hair lying limply on his bald head, and his nose stuck out sharply from his collapsed face like a handle on a teapot. Ein wirklicher Aryanische Nase.
When Miriam first came to Caracas, she must have been in her twenties and she told me he would often sleep with her before sending her to find clients in the quay-side bars. We talked of her first days in the Centre, and later how she’d been grabbed when she went ashore to buy food and was press-ganged into the great flesh trade, and I told her how we’d eluded the Brits at Haifa, and swum or paddled our way past the soldiers and the sailors onto the beaches. I saw them again with their packs and rifles and tin hats and boots running up and down the beach. And I saw again the first electrocution, as I did most nights, and heard Hermann and the guards cheering.
The next day, October 9th, 1958, His Holiness Pope Pius XII died of old age in his villa in Italy.
Hermann Kauffmann died of syphilis in his bungalow in Caracas.
And I died of misery in Kauffman’s garden shed.
Fabian Acker has won a number of short story competitions, as well as the Travel Writer of The Year Award from the Sunday Times, the BT Technology Writer of the Year, and used to contribute regularly to Radio 4’s travel programme, Itchy Feet. The first third of his working life he spent as a merchant seaman, except for two years military service in the Royal Engineers, the second third as a journalist, and he is now working his way through the last third under the motto Don’t Stop Breathing. He is a Bargee First Class, and claims to have once been a bus conductor for Huddersfield Transport Corporation. He works occasionally for the National Council of Journalists as a tutor, trying to discourage journalists from using clichés using pre-frontal leucotomy, but with very little light at the end of the tunnel.
