I Am Pilgrim(19)

But beneath all the jokes, he knew what he was doing. Years later, I realized what an expert eye he had, which was strange, given that he was completely untrained and his family’s only interest had been chemicals. His mother’s name before she married had been DuPont.

The second week we were in Paris, Bill got a call from a guy in Strasbourg who said he had a sheaf of drawings by Robert Rauschenberg dating from when the great Pop artist was an unknown marine. The next day, Bill and I got on a plane with a bag packed for the weekend, leaving Grace to indulge her second great passion – shopping at Hermès.

And so it was, once Bill had bought the drawings, that we found ourselves in Strasbourg on a Sunday with nothing to do. ‘I thought we might go out to the Vosges mountains,’ he said. ‘Grace’d probably say you’re too young, but there’s a place you should see – sometimes life can seem difficult, and it’s important to keep things in perspective.’

Bill knew about Natzweiler-Struthof because of his father – he’d been a lieutenant colonel in the US Sixth Army that had campaigned across Europe. The colonel had arrived at the camp just after the SS abandoned it, and he was given the job of writing a report that found its way to the War Crimes Tribunal in Nuremburg.

I don’t know if Bill had ever read his father’s document, but he found the twisting road without any trouble and we pulled into the car park just before noon, a brilliant summer’s day. Slowly we walked into death’s house.

The camp had been preserved as a French historic site because so many members of the Resistance had died there. Bill pointed out the old hotel outbuilding the Germans had converted into a gas chamber, and a crematorium packed with body-elevators and ovens.

For one of the few times in my life, I held his hand.

We passed the gallows used for public executions, the building where they had conducted medical experiments, and came to Prisoner Barracks Number One, which housed a museum. Inside – among the prisoners’ old uniforms and diagrams of the concentration-camp system – we got separated.

In a quiet corner at the back, near a row of bunk beds where the surrounding ghosts seemed even more tangible, I found a photo displayed on a wall. Actually, there were a lot of photos of the Holocaust, but this was the one that has never left me. It was in black and white and it showed a short, stocky woman walking down a wide path between towering electrified fences. By the look of the light it was late in the afternoon, and in the language of those times she was dressed like a peasant.

By chance there were no guards, no dogs, no watchtowers in the photo, though I’m sure they were there – just a lonely woman with a baby in her arms and her other two children holding tight to her skirt. Stoic, unwavering, supporting their tiny lives – helping them as best as any mother could – she walked them towards the gas chamber. You could almost hear the silence, smell the terror.

I stared at it, both uplifted and devastated by the stark image of a family and a mother’s endless love. A small voice inside, a child’s voice, kept telling me something I’ve never forgotten: I would have such as to have known her. Then a hand fell on my shoulder. It was Bill, come to find me. I could see from his eyes he’d been crying.

Overwhelmed, he indicated the piles of shoes and small items such as hairbrushes that the inmates had left behind. ‘I didn’t realize how powerful ordinary things can be,’ he said.

Finally, we walked up a path inside the old electrified fence towards the exit gates. As we wound our way up, he asked me, ‘Did you see the part about the gypsies?’

I shook my head: no.

‘They lost even more in percentage terms than the Jews.’

‘I didn’t know that,’ I said, trying to be grown up.

‘Nor did I,’ he replied. ‘They don’t call it the Holocaust, the gypsies. In their language they have another name for it. They call it the Devouring.’

We walked the rest of the way to the car in silence and flew back to Paris that night. By some unspoken agreement, we never mentioned to Grace where we had been. I think we both knew she would never have understood.

Months later, a couple of nights before Christmas, I walked down the stairs at the quiet house in Greenwich and was stopped by voices raised in anger. ‘Five million dollars?’ Grace was saying incredulously. ‘Still, you do what you like, I suppose – it’s your money.’

‘Damn right it is,’ he agreed.

‘The accountant says it’s going to an orphanage in Hungary,’ she said. ‘That’s another thing I don’t understand – what do you know about Hungary?’