Good People (41 page)

For weeks he sat in the beer hall pretending that no one here could know him until one day, during a poker game, a Gestapo officer asked whether he was Thomas Heiselberg of the ‘Model of the Polish People'. He nodded, and said nothing, but the officer, who had annoyed Thomas earlier by shuffling the cards with excessive skill, went on, ‘There was great interest in your model when we arrived in Lublin. We had rather shitty intelligence lists then. Okay, the President of the Regional Court and the Vice-President for Appeals were simple cases: a bullet in the head, and no more appeals. But there were school principals, Catholic professors, music lovers…And then the order came down to pay attention to archaeologists. We liquidated people because they had pottery bowls at home.'

As they were leaving, the officer grabbed his arm, breathed beer fumes in his ear and said, ‘Sometimes we wonder, Mr Model—you know, even the little guys with their fingers on the trigger have a few thoughts—whether everything that we did was so necessary.' The ghost-fingers of the officer pinched his flesh for a long time afterwards.

At night Lublin was as dark as a small village. The warm lights of Berlin, for which he was partly responsible—‘Burners of the Night' was his name for the advertising people who understood the potential of an illuminated aerial display—seemed like a figment of memory. The dark city made him ill at ease, an uneasiness that was muffled in other people's company, but which burst out in a deafening scream
when he was alone. That's why he used to wander the city in the wee hours. He would walk along the dimly lit main street, approach the twisting wall of the old town—he became used to showing his documents to policemen, who dubbed him ‘the sleepwalking officer'—and would descend into the Jewish area, which stank of sewage and fish, a kind of valley of densely packed wooden houses. Above them, as though in a different kingdom, rose the castle; the Jews' houses below it looked like the talons of a monster from a fairytale. He didn't understand why all the governors of the city—Russian, Polish and now German, too—wasted such a fine castle on criminals.

The buildings, headquarters and labour camps that he saw in his wanderings in Lublin breathed life into the various inquiries that used to reach the offices of the model in Warsaw. An SS doctor, for example, who took care of prisoners in the castle, complained that Gestapo headquarters in the ‘house under the clock' were sending sacks of corpses to him and asking him to state ridiculous causes of death such as heart failure, throat infection and influenza. ‘My question: is there a group of diseases typical of the Poles that we can indicate in the forms without further details?' Naturally they had not answered that ignominious question, and joked that an alarming number of madmen now wanted help from the model.

Lublin was so small—it was ten minutes from the ‘house under the clock' to the castle, and along the way you passed by most of the Reich institutions in the city. Here, the elaborate recommendations that he had formulated in Warsaw and sent off into the unknown took on simple forms: stone, house, roof, wall. There he was, walking along the path taken by the sacks of corpses.

About an hour before dawn he would wander back to his house. He was fond of the darkness in the stairwell, would grip the loose banister, the wooden steps would creak under his boots and sometimes the moonlight would coat the rusty mailboxes. Climbing the stairs, he couldn't help remembering his apartment on Nowy Swiat and the fine buildings on Krakowskie Przedmiescie. During his first week here, disconcerted by his isolation, he had sneaked into a party in a splendid
apartment with a fine balcony, a large parlour and a high ceiling. The new landlord made a proud display of a silver Hanukkah Menorah, decorated with a handsome relief of two lions.

Many apartments on that street had become vacant after the Jews were evicted. He submitted several fruitless requests to be given one, and was at last allocated this mouldy apartment on the top floor of an antiquated building on Lindenstrasse, formerly Lipowa Street. He wondered whether instructions had been sent from Warsaw and Berlin to annoy him in little matters as well.

Two weeks passed after his arrival in Lublin before he was summoned to SS headquarters. In those idle days he submitted a request to meet Odilo Globocnik, commander of the SS and the police, mentioning their cordial exchange of letters while he was the director of the office of the model in Warsaw. He received a negative answer, which implied surprise at his very request. When he asked to meet the district governor Ernst Zerner he also alluded to his ‘correspondence with my former office' and was answered with a polite letter stating that the governor, being very busy, might find some free time in April.

One morning an officer had appeared at his apartment and announced that he must report immediately to SS headquarters. He pushed open the heavy wooden doors, took in the marble columns, the small light fixtures, and stepped down the broad corridor. The stairs reminded him of the Four Seasons Hotel. He hoped that here, on the second floor, he would be given an office, and perhaps he might still rise again. After all, Lublin could be a place to recover, out of sight, to reflect on things before beginning to struggle once more for his position.

But his hopes were dashed: the two minor officials whom he met lorded it over him and explained that they knew all about ‘his tricky manoeuvres in Warsaw'. They told him straight out that the Foreign Office did not like him. He asked whether he was still employed by the Foreign Office and was told that he had not been discharged. Apparently somebody there must still believe he could be useful. But here in Lublin, since all the agencies tried to keep the Foreign Office
out of their business, he would be under SS supervision.

‘But in Warsaw I was under the district governor's authority,' Thomas protested. ‘Why will I be subordinate to the SS in Lublin?'

‘Because the district governor doesn't want anything to do with you,' they told him.

The powers that had joined together to bring him down in Warsaw and exile him to Lublin, as if it were a kind of penal colony, were still conniving to direct his life. He was asked in a dismissive tone to draft a report about the Belorussian man, in accordance with instructions he would receive from Dr Georg Weller, the director of the offices of the model. He was stunned by the contempt shown for him by these two little bugs, but remained businesslike and asked what resources for research would be at his disposal. When writing the Model of the Polish People, he had made use of ten years of comprehensive research, but he didn't know Belorussia at all.

‘You can write to institutes in Germany. Not far from here, in Cracow, you'll find the new Institute for the Study of the East, and there's also a library in the city,' the officer answered.

‘With those scanty means I can't write something equivalent in detail to the Polish model,' Thomas protested.

‘You aren't expected to come up with such a brilliant achievement.' The officers exchanged looks. ‘Just do the best you can.'

Thomas asked no more questions. After a few cold parting words, he left the room. The instructions from Warsaw never came, of course, but a week later he was summoned to SS headquarters again, and ordered to begin work, and since for the time being there was no office for him, he could surely write at home, and submit a progress report every week. ‘Dr Weller,' they said, ‘expects you to do the best possible work. Remember that the time allocated for completion of the project is not unlimited.' As he expected, the reports he submitted received no response.

August Frenzel, one of the officers who had mocked him at the first meeting, apparently felt sorry for him and after one of his weekly visits saw him to the door and said that no one enjoyed harassing him
here. But explicit instructions had been conveyed to Globocnik. ‘You acquired some very powerful enemies,' Frenzel clucked in appreciation. Other clerks and officers, who had heard of the glorious reputation of the model, also treated him like a leper who carried with him lessons that were worth learning. ‘If you fell so hard, you must have been very high. Perhaps you could tell us your story one day.'

‘Of course,' Thomas answered amicably. ‘We could meet one evening for a drink at the Deutsches Haus, and I'll tell you everything. Such a long and complicated story might take a few evenings, but we have all the time in the world.'

The panic that gripped Frenzel at the very idea that he might be seen in his company amused him.

During the first months no one approached him. Not until December did he receive a letter from the German Munitions Company, which had recently been made responsible for the workshops on his street. The writer asked his advice about training Jewish workers who ‘until now were mainly employed as shoemakers and tailors', and whom the company was interested in teaching how to use the most advanced equipment in Germany. The man had written to him because someone in the office of Walter Salpeter in Berlin had praised the training program at Milton, which Thomas had once directed.

Thomas had some earlier acquaintance with the workshops in the Lindenstrasse camp. One night, during the first snow, he came home and stood at the window to watch the snowflakes falling on the city. Suddenly, about twenty metres from his window, a knot of naked bodies coalesced in the darkness. At first the sight was so strange that he supposed the whiteness of the snow must be deluding him, but then he understood that naked people really were standing in the snowed court, and the little hillocks around them were prostrate naked bodies. Dogs began to bark. Beams of light crisscrossed the snow, picking up a white foot, a withered buttock, a shaven scalp, a boyish chest, the nape of a man buried facedown in the snow. Some of the limbs quivered in the spotlight, others remained frozen. He realised that he was counting the dead and the living and the ones he couldn't classify. In
a few minutes the lights went off, the shapes of dogs moved among the bodies, their barking mingled with the whistling of the wind.

After that night he no longer pushed aside that curtain. He regarded it as part of the wall. There was another window.

That was why, when the man from the German Munitions Company offered to arrange a visit to the workshops in the camp, Thomas refused, saying he had heard stories about inappropriate treatment of the workers, treatment that was of no utility, especially because some of them were prisoners of war. The man admitted that such complaints had also reached him—apparently they referred to initiation ceremonies held by the guards for new groups. He would see to it that these contemptible practices stopped. Thomas replied courteously that it was clear to him that the intentions of his company were pure, but he himself had no relevant expertise and, by the way, conditions were decent at Milton, including professional training, social benefits and even the idea of profit sharing with workers who excelled. ‘To my great regret, nothing that I know from Milton can be applied to your Jewish slaves.' He didn't even try to conceal his disgust.

‘Your answer surprises me, Herr Heiselberg,' the man exclaimed. ‘The expert opinion that the directorate of the Model of the Polish People submitted to us, signed by you, states that the initiative to employ Jewish prisoners from the Polish army in our munitions factory was welcome and useful.'

‘I don't remember writing anything like that,' Thomas grumbled. ‘And in any event I wasn't referring to a camp like this.'

He would get up in the late morning with no idea how he would pass the time. All the days of the week were fused into a single day: holidays or his birthday he remembered only weeks later. During the day he didn't leave the house. Even after he planned his tasks in the evening for the next day, he put them off as the morning light spread out. In the afternoon he laid the table with a pale turquoise dinner set, a legacy from the evicted owners, and took supper in the small parlour, but went out at night to eat sausages in a beer hall or cabbage rolls in
the restaurant near his house, where his custom of folding his napkin at the end of the meal and slipping it into a silver ring always aroused embarrassed smiles.

Once a week he submitted a short progress report to SS headquarters, bought groceries, went to the barber, and that was as far as his contact with daylight went. At SS headquarters they always asked him whether he felt well. Frenzel, who was somewhat closer to him than the others, decided he was sick and urged him to consult a doctor. Even the women who sold meat and vegetables pointed at his pasty colour and volunteered advice. These small acts of kindness caused a strange paralysis in him; the impression he wanted to give, that Thomas Heiselberg was an energetic person with tricks up his sleeve, was wearing thin. He was an amiable pest who still didn't grasp that his life's work had collapsed.

He noticed that his movements were becoming sluggish, as if his body understood that it was best to stretch out time so he wouldn't sink into complete lethargy. He would sit on the sofa with the charcoal stove at his feet—when he moved away from it and got cold his only desire was to warm himself up again there. Sometimes for a whole week he would sleep in the morning and doze off in the afternoon, or keep turning over a single idea which contained the solution to all his troubles: he would walk around the apartment, lie on his bed, lean forwards on the sofa, scrape the red lacquer from the desk, mutter instructions to his memory, trying to grasp all the unravelling threads, and in the evening he would give up, realising that he had succumbed to a new kind of attack. If he felt calmer, he would sit at the peeling desk and type page after page about the Model of the Belorussian People—but his ideas were just abstract thoughts and were not founded on evidence. In fact he was drawing conclusions from the Polish, French and Italian models, and jumbling them together with snippets and theories from books. Dozens of pages piled up on his desk. He had always loved models. There was no distress that didn't have a model, and now he was enjoying the tangle of his sentences: