The Secretary by Catherine Hokin

Author:Catherine Hokin [Hokin, Catherine]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 9

Magda, February 1945

The thread snapped. Magda had known it would from the moment Himmler let slip where Walther was being held. She still clung on to her desperate hope that something would save him until long after that hope stopped being a rational one.

Plötzensee Prison, the place where Walther was immediately taken on his arrest, was the execution site, the last stop on the torture line. It was impossible to work at SS headquarters and not be aware of what the name meant. Magda had seen the green vans that fed it moving hooded prisoners out of the basement cells in Prinz Albrecht Straβe, even though everyone was meant to be as blind to those transports as they were to the rest. She knew about the prison’s frighteningly high suicide rate, about the thumbscrews and the lights that burned all night, and the cells that were too small for the inmates to raise their arms in. And about the hooks hanging in a long row whose nooses were considered a more efficient method of killing than the guillotine they had replaced, which had only been able to dispatch one inmate at a time.

Magda had known the truth about Plötzensee. She had walked through its gates on a freezing February morning and felt its menace. Despite all that knowledge, however, until the moment weeks later when she held the letter in her hand announcing his murder, she still refused to believe the prison would be Walther’s ending. Even though she had sat in front of the man she had known for almost ten years – the man she had misjudged and relearned, admired and loved – and known that he was broken and past helping, she had refused to believe it. Even though she had felt the pain of his ruin collect like ice around her heart, she had still allowed herself to be fooled. She had still let Walther lull her into thinking there was a different way out for him.

‘They’ll find a use for me yet, you’ll see. I’ve proved myself pretty nimble at unwinding rope, which is what passes for work round here. Maybe they’ll make a shipbuilder out of me – isn’t that what they use the fibres for? Or maybe they’ll stick me in the Volkssturm with all the boys and the old men they’ve finally forced into a uniform. There’d be a rather pleasing irony in that, don’t you think? All these years “undermining the Fatherland” – which is one of the charges against me apparently – and then off I go, fighting to preserve it in its dying days.’

Her visit in February 1945 was the first time she had seen him since his arrest four months earlier in October. As haggard as he was, he was still trying to be the old charming Walther. All they had given her was fifteen minutes. Fifteen minutes was nothing, especially when it was stacked against a friendship spanning ten years, but Magda knew it was a miracle she had been granted any time with him at all.

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