A Song for Summer

Needless to say, the perpetrator of this brutality was immediately marched off to the camp commandant in his office, where he admitted his guilt and was entirely unrepentant.

"If you don't get rid of people like Unterhausen you'll have a murder on your hands," he said, confusing the commandant with his flawless English. "Rounding up accredited Nazis with these people is madness.

You know perfectly well who the

real Nazis are in this camp--I've only been here a day but I can tell you: Schweger in Sunnydene, Pischinger in that place with the blue pottery cat--and the chap I threw out of the window. He's the only one who could possibly be a spy, and the sooner he's in a proper prison the better--anyone worth their salt could signal from here. As for Schweger, he's in with some hotheads from the Jewish Freedom Movement and they're starving him to death."

"Thank you for telling me my business," said the commandant, and was disconcerted by an entirely friendly smile from the tall, broad-shouldered man with the scar on his forehead. He looked down at the papers that had come with the prisoner.

"You say you're a Czech."

"I don't say I am; I am," said the prisoner unruffledly.

"So what are you doing here? The Czechs are our allies."

Marek was silent. The Czechs might be allies now, but before, at Munich, they had been betrayed.

"Your name is German."

"Yes. I came over in a fishing boat; we were strafed and capsized outside Dover. I got concussion.

Apparently I spoke German to the dogs."

"The dogs?"'

"There was a whole compound of stray dogs which the tommies had smuggled out of France when they were taken off at Dunkirk--you've never heard such a racket. They put my stretcher down beside a big black and tan pointer. My father's hunting dogs were always trained in German and when I came round--"'

He shook his head. "It doesn't matter about me; they'll sort it out. I'm quite glad to be out of the way till the Czechoslovak Air Force reassembles. But Unterhausen must go, and the other Nazis--and old Professor Cohen must go to hospital--the one who stands by the barbed wire and gets his beard caught. He's very eminent and very ill--if he dies there'll be questions asked. They're being asked already in Parliament and elsewhere."

"Is there anything else you'd like to tell us?"' sneered the second in command, a brash young lieutenant, but the commandant frowned him down. A humane man, he knew full well that he was caught up in one of those administrative muddles that happens in war and can claim lives.

It was to him that Marek spoke. "Most of the people in here understand what has happened--that there was bound to be confusion after the French surrendered, that we've got mixed up with the parachuting nuns and that it won't go on for ever. But not all of them. There have been two suicides in one of the other camps, as you no doubt know. This whole business--interning the people who have most of all to fear from Hitler--is going to be a pretty discreditable episode in retrospect. What's more, if Hitler does invade, you've made it nice and easy for him, corralling all the Jews and the anti-Nazis together so he doesn't have to go looking."

"So what is it you want?"' asked the commandant.

"A piano," said Marek.

As he came out he found a knot of excited people standing in the street.

"I told you," cried a young man, scarcely more than a boy, who rushed up and threw his arms round Marek. "I told them it had to be you! I said if someone had defenestrated Unterhausen it would be you!

But you aren't German, are you? How did you get here?"'

"How did you get here?"' said Marek, suddenly angry. "You can't even be seventeen." were they interning children now?

"I told them I was older," said Leon. "When they came to take my father, I wanted to come too. My mother and sisters are in a camp on the other side of the island."

Leon's father, Herr Rosenheimer, now came forward to shake Marek's hand. Though he had filed naturalisation papers the week before his arrest and his export-import business employed more than four hundred British workers, he seemed to be without bitterness, and had persuaded the internees (from whom all news of the outside world was forbidden) to save the newspapers that came wrapped round their ration of kippers, so that he could keep in touch with the stock exchange.

Other familiar faces now appeared in the throng: the er/while flautist of the Berlin Philharmonic; a copying clerk from the office of Universal Editions; Marek's old tailor from the K@arntnerstrasse ... and all the time more people appeared, overjoyed by the news of Unterhausen's

fate.

But Marek did not intend to waste too much time on swapping stories--and Leon, whose reminiscences would lead to Hallendorf and thus to Ellen, had straight away to understand that there would be no discussion of the past.