Chapter 20: Questions

After being bundled from the room expecting to be shot, Margery passed an uncomfortable and degrading few hours with the guards during which she was raped repeatedly. She was relieved when a van arrived and she was given her dress, though no other clothes. Then she was driven away without any inkling of her destination. Her reasoning was that if she was to be shot, the ever efficient Germans would not have gone to the trouble of driving her any distance before disposing of her.

At the Gestapo headquarters she was first left in a cold dark windowless cell with no furniture whatever, lacking even toilet facilities beyond a drain hole in one corner of the room. Only a bare concrete floor was available for sitting or sleeping. Margery spent an interminable time there, totally unable to judge how long she had been there, or how much longer she would suffer, dressed as she was only in her revealing evening dress, with no underwear, shoes or coat.

Three hours, which felt like an eternity to her, later she was taken out of the cell by two guards in ordinary Army uniforms and marched into an office. A short, fat man in plain clothes, who looked more like a bank clerk than a torturer, took charge of Margery's interrogation. She was made to stand before the Sergeant who was sitting behind his desk. The guards stood just inside the door, behind the prisoner.

"You are Margery Jennings. It is alleged that you said that our beloved Führer is a silly little man with a very silly moustache," accused her interrogator, "and then that you said that you would not sit down and eat with Nazis."

Margery said nothing.

"So you do not deny it?" asked the Sergeant.

"I have nothing to say to you until my lawyer arrives," she replied.

"This is the Gestapo, investigating anti-state activities. There will be no lawyer. You will be investigated and interrogated by our rules, which allow us to keep you here for as long as necessary and to use any means of persuasion we see fit," commented the Sergeant, "That will include, in your case, using any level of pain or degree of humiliation to persuade you to tell us what we wish to hear."

"Tell me what you want me to say, and I will repeat it for you," sneered Margery with a bravado she didn't know she had.

"Oh no. That would be too easy. Until you have said what we want to hear, we won't tell you that it was what we wanted. On the way to this achievement, we will ask some questions which may or may not be relevant to our search. For example, which is the more sensitive of your nipples, left or right?"

"How dare you!" she snorted, "That is no business of yours."

"If you won't tell me I will have to discover by trial and error. To facilitate that discovery, please remove your clothing," he asked affably.

"Certainly not!"

"If you remove the dress yourself it will not be damaged in the process. If my men remove it they may well render it unusable afterwards, and if I am not mistaken it is the only garment you possess here."