Johann and Daniel
by Charles Lacey
Chapter 6
Christopher.
Alicia, bless her generous heart, came up with all kinds of people that needed to be hidden and moved to safety. I, and several other people, did the best we could for them. I do know, since I met a couple of them after the War ended, that at least some of the people we helped reached places of safety. A good many of them were Jews, though there were others, including one Polish man with a mental illness who just happened to be a brilliant mathematician. He had been working at the University, until the Nazis took over. He ended up in England, doing some kind of secret work – I have a notion he may have been working on ciphers.
Talking of ciphers, we communicated using the Playfair cipher. It's not unbreakable, but it is pretty effective as long as you choose an unguessable key-word. There are plenty of good books on the subject, if you want to know in detail how it works.
But one evening Alicia sent a message to me and asked if there were any chance of getting two young refugees, one of them Jewish, to Munich on their way to Geneva. As it happened, I needed to take a biggish batch of samples to a warehouse there, so I agreed. I had a big Daimler saloon that the company I worked for had supplied. I parked at an agreed spot; fortunately the weather was wet and the soldiers were more interested in keeping dry than patrolling the streets. The two refugees crept in and hid under a blanket on the back seat, and I thought they must be pretty slender to both fit there. I got out of Linz and into the countryside, and then I had to stop to water a bit of roadside.
When I got back into the car, I lifted the blanket, in readiness to question them as anything they could tell me would be of interest to my contacts back in England. But I was surprised to see that they were mere boys, no more than sixteen or so. One of them was obviously Jewish, but I didn't know what to make of the other one until he told me he had been at a Hitler Youth camp and had been found in bed with another boy. My heart turned over at that; it could so easily have been me. He was a very good looking boy, too, in a mousy kind of way, and in other circumstances I could have found him very attractive. But the only thing I could do then was to drop them off in Munich and give them a safe address in Geneva to try to get to. But my heart went out to the pair of them, especially the one who had been caught in a homosexual act. I'd been honest with myself for a while and knew that after we won the war I'd want to go and live in Denmark or somewhere of that kind and, hopefully, find myself a boyfriend.
But those two poor lads! I screwed every ounce of information I could from them, and got it all tucked away in my memory. Part of my training had been in methods of memorizing large quantities of gen. By the time I had finished with them I probably knew more about them than they did about themselves. Anyway, I got to Munich and let them know that the street was clear. I gave them such few Reichsmarks as I had to spare. And that was all I could do for them, except to hope and pray that they made it to safety.
But the thought of them haunted me for a long time. They were clearly very apprehensive, and with good reason. They were running away from certainly imprisonment, probably torture and quite possibly death. But I sensed that they were more than just friends, and I truly hoped that once they were out of danger they might discover something deeper together. Our sort of man is rare, and we get an undeserved bad name, but we can be as brave as anyone else when the need arises.
I'm reminded of the "Sacred band of Thebes". They were a small army, back in ancient Greece. They were made up entirely of pairs of male lovers. The idea was that not one of them would want to look cowardly or foolish in front of his lover. Apparently it worked; they were undefeated in battle until Alexander the Great conquered them. And, the story goes, he buried their dead with great honour. I don't think they were pansies!
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