Not Me (4 page)

But here, in the day of crisis, he had written to
me
.

And so now, my Michael, my firstborn, my young hero with the sharp tongue, my beloved son, my hope, the time has come to tell my story. You will assume that I have thought about this for a long time
—
but you must be assured that it is not because of you that I have withheld
—
not because of anything about you, not even because I wanted to protect you. Rather, I have tried so desperately to reinvent myself, to cast off the past like a rotten coat, to never, ever even think of it, lest God hear my thoughts and somehow punish me again. That was cowardice, I admit it. But over time, it became something else
—
love. I am a Jew, first and foremost. I embrace it with all my heart and soul. I yearn for all that is Jewish in the world to rise from the depths and purify the air around us
—
to spring clean our souls! That is the power of the Jewish life
—
cleansing and hopeful and joyous. So why go back in time to another world, a dark and gruesome world, a world of hatred and pain?

But God will not let me alone. I am punished for my sins through my beautiful and innocent daughter. And if I do not now confess, will you be next?

Whatever you learn of me, from this day forth, remember, man is nothing but a vessel of God’s will
—
even so
—
he must bear the responsibility of his actions, as if they were his own.

He put a mark under these paragraphs, like this =========, and I realized that he was done writing for that day.

After that there were several blank pages, a page or two with some scribblings that had been violently crossed out and obliterated, and finally what looked like a title page.

It read, simply,

A Story

And when I turned the page, I was surprised to see not the continuation of the diary, or journal, but what appeared to be the first paragraphs of a novel.

Heinrich Mueller joined the SS in 1939, largely because his cousin, SS-Obersturmführer Hans Mueller, of Special Unit 4, had returned from the front, that is, from Poland, and told him he was a fool if he let himself be drafted into the regular army.

“And anyway,” Hans had said, “everyone thinks you’re head of the Gestapo already.”

He was referring of course to Heinrich Müller, the chief of the Gestapo, because of the similarity between their names. But Heinrich did not wish to be a policeman. So he signed up with the Waffen-SS, thinking he would be a war hero. Instead, he was trained as an accountant, and attached to the Budget and Construction Office, but not in Berlin. He was given his silver death’s-head for his cap, had his rank raised to second lieutenant, and was sent to do the books in Bergen-Belsen. He was well suited for the work. He liked numbers. He also enjoyed the study of language. He spent his spare time reading English, and found, much to his amusement, that he had also picked up a great deal of the Jewish dialect as well, simply from interacting with the few inmates he had impressed into service as bookkeepers, and with whom he found himself conversing almost as if it were a normal day at the office. In fact, he took special pleasure in aping their ways and amusing his friends in the officers’ club
—
the self-deprecating shuffle, the unpleasant singsong cadence, the curiously convoluted logic. Still, he would never have considered this knowledge of Jewish worthwhile, for he could not regard it as a language. It was just a bastardized mixture of tongues. Just a joke to amuse his friends.

Two years later, he found himself transferred to the East, namely to the Majdanek Concentration Camp, near Lublin. The job was similar, but more depressing. By comparison, Bergen was a spa. For here the smell of burning flesh was constant, and in the blocks themselves the stench of excrement and rot overwhelming. It made him hate the Jew even more. He was lucky though. He rarely had to leave the relative comfort of the SS compound, which was far across the highway. And in any case, his responsibilities were for Camp B, the labor camp, and not the other operation, to which he decided he had no connection at all. He worked in his office, taking his meals in town. Lublin was but walking distance, except on very cold nights. It was not that he agreed or disagreed. He saw its necessity. And frankly, he was too busy to worry about it. There was so much to account for: clothing, jewelry, artifacts, furs. Plus the cost of new construction, of food, of supplies, which were, by the way, very hard to get, and even harder to keep track of. However, he could tell you exactly how to derive the utmost profit from a human being, given the cost of his ration and general upkeep, and taking into account his initial age, health, height, weight, and national origin.

In 1945 Heinrich Mueller found himself back in Bergen-Belsen when Majdanek was abandoned under pressure of the Soviet advance. It was there, in Bergen-Belsen, in April of that year, that he was liberated by the British.

This occurred in the following way. Heinrich, sensing the end was near
—
it was not a difficult calculation, after all
—
starved himself for three weeks. When the day approached and many of the Germans fled, only, he assumed, to be caught and hanged, he instead shaved his head, exchanged his uniform for the rags
—
which he carefully deloused
—
of a dead prisoner, rolled himself in the mud, and waited. While he was lying there in a trench, surrounded by
—
but not touching
—
dead bodies, he had noticed that many of the prisoners had been tattooed with numbers. They had not done this at Majdanek, but he saw no reason not to ice the cake. At night, he slipped back into the officers’ compound, and with a needle dipped in ink, he tattooed a number into his forearm. He had copied the number from a corpse that had been lying next to him. Then he hurried back to the trench.

When the troops arrived, he crawled out from among the dead bodies, and was saved. They fed him a little Spam.

They asked him who he was. He held out his arm.

No, they said, your name.

He looked at them with the blank stare of the walking dead. A young soldier walked up to him and took his hands. It’s all right, he said in Yiddish. I’m Jewish, too. What’s your name?

He realized with panic that he hadn’t thought of any name. They looked at each other for what seemed to him an eternity.

Heshel Rosenheim, he suddenly said.

It was the name of one of the Jewish bookkeepers from whom he had gleaned so many Yiddish words. It was the first name that popped into his head.

He did not know if the real Heshel Rosenheim was alive or dead, but it really didn’t matter
—
unless of course he ran into him. But other than Rosenheim and a few of his other
Kapos,
there was almost no one who could recognize him. For one thing there were sixty thousand prisoners here, and most of them had just arrived from somewhere else, spirited away from death camps farther east. He was in a position to know this, after all. He was the bean counter. So, he reasoned, he could be from anywhere. Who would question him? He thought about things now, about how things work out. For years he secretly despised himself for doing so little for the Fatherland, stuck in that office doing calculations. Yes, yes, he knew how important his task was
—
still, he had only been a
bürohengst—
a pencil pusher. But now, he realized with a kind of joy, he had actually been fortunate! And indeed he was pleased with himself. Pleased that he had had the foresight to stay away from the main camps, pleased that he had so little to do with
—
well
—
anything. For one thing, he wasn’t the type to go out and shoot people. And he almost never frequented the brothel. The filthy Jewish women held little interest for him. And thus there were few prisoners, if any, who might recognize him. And those who could
—
why they were almost certainly dead. As for Rosenheim, surely he was dead too. No one could survive that long. Such a thing would have been economically unfeasible.

In any case, his main worry right now was to avoid the typhus that had spread throughout the camp. He kept to himself. He drank only from the army water tanks. And he watched carefully for every opportunity to help himself, staying as close as he could to the British soldiers. But something happened in those first two days that struck him as hilarious. The stupid British in their zeal to help these insects, these roaches, plied them with rations. The greedy Jews stuffed themselves with food, and soon were convulsed in the dirt, screaming their guts out, puking and shitting at the same time, and in an hour or so they were dead. They had eaten themselves to death.

But Rosenheim
—
for that is the name he now knew himself by
—
had starved only a few weeks, not a few years. His bowels had not yet shriveled to the size of a pencil lead. Nevertheless, he ate carefully, and sparingly. The British merely thought he was simply too far gone to care about food.

They sent him to a hospital in Lübeck, and from there to a D.P. camp near Geringshof, in the American Zone.

Not surprisingly, he recovered his health more quickly than most.

I literally jumped up from the La-Z-Boy, as if suddenly it was on fire. I couldn’t stop my hands from shaking, yet I could not put the journal down. It was glued to my fingers, like when you touch something really cold, like an ice cube or a metal pole that sticks to your skin—and it burns like hell, but you can’t let go. It seemed like it was leeching the blood right out of me, because I was completely dizzy, light-headed, I thought I might faint, and my heart was racing, and everything in the room was spinning. What in God’s name is he talking about? I cried. What, what,
what
? It was like pressure inside me rising, like a wave of vomit.
What?
I cried.
What?

Finally I threw the volume down on the side table. My hands felt so dirty. When I looked at them, I saw they were coated with a slimy film of orange-brown dust from the deteriorating leather.

Then I thought: I could not have been reading it right. After all, my German was rusty—to say the least. But I knew that except for the few words I had to skip over, I’d read with amazing accuracy and speed—Oh, I got it right, all right. I got it right.

Was my father not my father? Was he someone named Heinrich Mueller?
A Nazi war criminal?
No! These thoughts were too impossible. Nothing, nothing in his life, in his bearing, in his speech, in his work, could ever point to this. He was a man of light, not darkness. No. It had to be something else.

Certainly the writing could imply that he was not the Nazi at all, but his victim. Yes, he could have been twice over the victim of Heinrich Mueller! First as a concentration camp slave, and then having lost his identity to him. He had been used, without his knowledge, of course, as a cover for this Heinrich Mueller, to avoid prosecution, to shield him from justice! Surely, the pages to follow would show how he discovered this subterfuge, and how he revealed it to the world, and how he led the police to this…this …(I struggled for the word)—
pencil pusher
! Or…or…was it all just…a story…a novel…a work of imagination…the result of some sort of twisted, inverted logic of self-abuse…some sort of working out of my father’s guilt in which he turned himself into the villain of his own story, the mastermind of his own degradation—a monster—because…because he could not bear to be a survivor—or worse—because he
had
done something horrible, something monstrous, in order to survive.

I had heard of
Kapos,
of course. The prisoners who were like trustees—who guarded the other prisoners, beat them, lorded over them, taskmasters of their own people. Or the Jewish
Sondercommandos
who worked the crematoriums, shoving bodies into ovens, yanking gold from teeth, stoking the hellish fires for an extra ration of bread—to live another week, another month, perhaps even another year. Was that his lot? Was he one of those?

I could not imagine anything remotely like it.

I felt faint and had to sit down. But I did not want to sit again in my father’s chair. I stumbled toward the kitchen, which, even then, was still to me my mother’s world. The world of cooking, and having a cup of tea, a nice chat, a little piece of something just to tide you over. I sat down at the little Formica table, so small it really sat only two, and I yearned for my mother—something, I had to confess, I had not done at all since her death—not because I didn’t love her, but because it strangely seemed as if she were still alive. How often had I seen her in the years since college anyway? Practically never. Once a year, maybe. And on the phone—how often did I call? And when she would finally call me, what did I have to say? So the fact that she was dead did not really register. It was as if she was merely on the other coast, and I’d see her when I’d see her, and I’d talk to her when I’d talk to her. And now I wanted more than anything in the world to talk to her, to ask her. I needed to know what she knew.

I tried to conjure up her voice, but there was only silence and the hum of the refrigerator. So I sat there by myself trying to calm down.

All I could think about was that the table was so
small
. This made me intensely sad, and I didn’t know why. And then I recalled that when I first came to visit them here, ten years before, the three of us could not sit at this table together, even for a cup of coffee. And it was then that I understood: as far as they were concerned, I existed in some other realm. From now on, it was just the two of them. Like before I was even born. And that’s why we had breakfast in the dining room. And lunch and dinner in the dining room. And the cups of tea, the nice chats, the little somethings just to tide me over? Perhaps they didn’t happen at all.