Tuesday 20th – Jan and Mechelen – Spring/Summer 1941

“This is where it all started,” says Mechelen, climbing out of the car and walking to the patch of roughly grassed earth next to the junction. “This is the actual spot.”

Jan slowly walks over and joins him, picking at long stalks of grass bowing under the weight of their own spring growth. The verges are full of wild flowers, and there’s a fertile smell of dung and sun-warmed earth in the air. Mechelen kicks at the earth with the toe of his boot and says, “Look here – see that black layer? That’s ash from where they burned down the customs post. And down this road here – ” – he nods towards the east – “ – is where the they massacred the refugees on the train.”
“Really? Here? Can we go and look at the site?”

“Of course. Let’s walk – it’s only a mile or so.”

The hedges are bright with green leaves. It seems incongruous to Jan that he could be here in the spring sunshine, with all the new growth and new life budding and bursting, and be walking towards the site of one of the most infamous atrocities of recent history. It feels unreal, like so much of his experience since he joined the war effort.
Mechelen says, “You know the story, I suppose? At least, the official one?”

“Well…only what I picked up from the official papers when I was abroad – which I suppose is what you mean?”

Mechelen nods. “Most of that was true. But there were quite a lot of things suppressed. It was a powerful propaganda tool, of course, having so many civilians killed by what were obviously Slav elements. But there were some things that were considered too shameful or embarrassing to release into the public domain. I was here, remember: our unit was called up to help police the scene afterwards.”

“Oh?” Jan feels privileged to be talking to someone who is so knowledgeable, and who speaks with such insight about military and political matters: Mechelen has a calm, measured, matter-of-fact tone that reeks of authority and authoritativeness.

But Jan also feels somehow childish when he talks to Mechelen: as well as being a good ten years younger than Mechelen, he senses that the older man talks on at least two levels – the surface, literal level, and another, more obscure level, where words have veiled meanings and dangle hooks that will snag you if you commit yourself to an answer too quickly, or say something that’s ill-considered or stupid. He also thinks that Mechelen can sense his nervousness and inferiority, and that he plays against that, asking difficult rhetorical questions that Jan can only contemplate silently, having insufficient knowledge to form a proper judgement. Mechelen will let the silence drag on for a bit before dropping the dead weight of his definitive opinion into the empty space.

[…]

Jan generally still feels nervous and jumpy still whenever he’s around the proper soldiers, aware that he is a comparative child amongst these grown up men who have fought their way across the continent for the motherland, west and east, in all seasons, while he sat in his office in the middle east, pushing paper and manipulating numbers. It makes him feel as if there is a great void inside him, as if he’s hollow. When the grizzled veterans speak to him, he fears that he will open his mouth in reply and only silent air will come out, revealing his vacancy and emptiness. His insubstantiality.

The void stretches out behind him too, a vast space of uncertainty and […]. A chance remark or question from one of the experienced soldiers opens up that whole reservoir of doubt and lets it flood into his heart, brain, and mouth, and he finds himself gulping air and stuttering.

[…]

“When the partisans blew the track and the train derailed,” Mechelen goes on, “our refugees’ escort party – who’d got onto the train at L_stadt, when formal [responsibility] was transferred – ran for it as soon as they came under fire when the partisans closed in. That was something that wasn’t made known.”

“What happened to them?”

“They arrived at the nearest police post on our side of the border and reported the train wreck. Then they were shipped back to their unit. When the truth emerged the officer and the NCOs were court martialled – and quite rightly.”

Mechelen nods to himself, then goes on.

“So the refugees were left to look after themselves. There were plenty of people killed and badly injured in the crash, and people made themselves busy getting people out of the wreckage and trying to make the injured comfortable. Meanwhile the partisans had surrounded the area and were closing their net.”

The road they’re walking along is narrowing significantly, climbing towards the hump-backed bridge ahead. Bright sunshine and glowing leaves hang above the rough stone walls of the bridge, and Jan can see insects veering and looping in the light.

When they get to the [apex] of the bridge, Mechelen points down into the cutting below.

“That’s where they corralled all the men after they’d separated them from the women and children. There were about a hundred and fifty men altogether – mostly of working age, but quite a few elderly grandfathers and great-grandfathers. The Slavs didn’t differentiate. They made all of the male refugees strip naked, and then they tortured them before they killed them. The torture story was released – and some photographs and moving pictures of the scene, as you may recall – but there was some horrible, bestial things that the Slavs did that were never made known, even though they had potential propaganda value.” Mechelen pauses again, slowly brushing dust and pollen from the flat-topped stones of the bridge wall.

“There’s always that balance to strike between showing the enemy up as the barbarians that they are, and the shame of our people knowing what they have done to our side – especially if it makes us look weak or inferior. But they did all sorts of things – male rape, all kinds of sick tortures and games. They made the men do all sorts of things. Horrible. And then they shot them all.”

“And you have to remember that I was here, not long after it all happened. The smell, and the flies. And all the survivors milling around, trying to find their men folk amongst the blood and the brains and the shit and the mess. Not very pretty, trying to help a wife recover her two children’s daddy’s body when he’s got half a tree branch shoved up his arse and out through his side. Those things stay with you, and you remember the women’s faces, and what they said. And their voices.”