Holocaust (11 page)

“They won’t let you near him.”

“I’ll try. He is my husband, Rudi. He needs me.”

“Did Muller say he had any chance of being freed?”

“No. But I’m going anyway.”

I looked at her long, pretty face. I had to admire her. She could have divorced Karl, ignored him, fallen back on her Aryan status to save herself all this heartache.

“I’m going to go away also,” I said.

“With me?”

No, I told her. I could do my mother and Anna no good hiding in the flat. Or could I? I was the man of the family now. But I told Inga that I was convinced we would all be arrested, deported. There was still a Jewish Council of sorts in Berlin, but it was quieter and quieter every day; we were isolated, under siege. I said I would never let anyone take me. At least they would not take me alive.

Her eyes looked into mine, as if to say, “The way Karl went?” But she did not utter the words, and I was sorry for my foolish bravado. How did I know what I would do? I was no one to be bragging to her of my unproved courage. She had defied her family, married a Jew, stood by him. I asked her why.

“I loved him,” she said.

“It had to be more than that.”

“Respect, affection. Karl is gentle, he cannot hurt anyone. I saw too much bloody fighting in the streets—right in this neighborhood. Reds, Nazis, all of them. And my father coming home bloodied, tenants in this building screaming, battling. Karl was a revelation to
me. I did not know there were people who did not understand cruelty, violence. So what if he was a Jew? I have always been my own master.” She smiled. “Rudi, I am an old hand at running away. I ran away twice when I was a child—to get away from this awful place. But I didn’t get very far.”

I asked her if she would think I were a coward if I left my mother and Anna. She thought a moment and said no. She would look after them; a better protector than me. I’d be marked, picked up sooner or later.

I recall this conversation now, and I wonder whether I should have stayed. Tamar says it was the wisest decision I ever made. I could not have saved Mama and Anna from what happened to them. I would have become nothing more than another victim.

Inga and I walked into the studio.

“What were you two talking about?” asked my mother. “Did I hear you mention Karl?”

“No, Mama,” Inga said.

Anna looked up from her book. “I wish Karl were here. And Papa. It wouldn’t be so bad if we were all together.”

“Papa is fine,” my mother said. “His last letter said things were not that bad in Warsaw.” I barely concealed my anger with her blindness. Things were dreadful in Poland. “Papa is busy at the hospital. He’s the associate chief of medicine, and widely respected in the Jewish community.”

“Rudi, test me on dates,” Anna asked.

I sat down opposite her, with her workbook, where, in her small neat handwriting, she had written her homework.

As I read the dates off, I thought to myself: Here are Jews for you, worrying about history, learning, words, lessons, books—when their world is going up in smoke. Again maybe I was being too harsh with my own people. What else did we know but to learn, to mind our business, to make deals, to pray and hope that bad times would end?

As I began to read, the radio announcer was listing new rules governing Jews. The yellow star was to be worn. We could not use public transport. No Jew could receive social security or any other government benefit. Synagogues were to be closed.

I shouted at the radio, “Go to hell, you lousy bastard.”

With infuriating calm, my mother said: “That won’t help, Rudi.”

“It’ll help me.”

“You going to test me or not?” asked Anna. How I pitied my sister, my mother. They thought life could go on—school, growing up, family.

“Okay, okay. Fifteen twenty-one.”

“Diet of Worms.”

And the radio voice intervening: “All Jewish documents and passports must be stamped with a J …”

“Sixteen eighteen,” I said.

“Start of the Thirty Years’ War,” Anna shouted.

Yes, we knew about history all right. But we didn’t understand the history being made at that moment.

The radio droned on. “Possession of any weapon by Jews will be deemed a capital crime and can be …”

“Seventeen seventy-six.”

“American Revolution!”

“Regarding the yellow star,” the voice said, “it will be worn at all times, and failure to wear it will mean an offense against the state …”

“Eighteen fourteen,” I said. And I wanted to kill the voice coming from the radio.

“Defeat of Napoleon!”

“Stores owned by Jews must be registered and owners must …”

I jumped from the table and turned the radio off.

My mother seemed oblivious. Or was this her way of trying to give us courage, to maintain this act, this little drama of hers—that all would work out if we remained calm, and let the storm blow over?

She looked up from her letter. Her face, once fresh and unlined, was gaunt. She ate little. There were hollows beneath her eyes. I knew that she saved the best
food for Anna and me, bribed local merchants, watched our small savings, worried about our health.

“Anna,” she said, “it’s important you keep up with your lessons. We’ll work on algebra tomorrow. In spite of everything, you must prepare yourself for your life ahead. And I assure you, you will have a good life. Rudi, it wouldn’t hurt for you to read a book now and then.”

I saw tears rimming Anna’s eyes. I patted her hand, but said nothing.

That night, when they were asleep, I filled a knapsack with toilet articles, some underwear, a few other things. As a kid, I’d done a lot of camping, outdoor living. Karl had never enjoyed it; he was always the one who got bit by mosquitoes, or got poison ivy. I had an old woodsman’s knife my grandfather had given me, and I packed that also.

Of course I hadn’t told my mother or Anna a word of this, but a week earlier, I’d been to see a man who had worked with Lowy, the printer. He was an engraver, a fellow named Steinmann, and he had concocted a fake identity card for me. The photograph was me, but everything else was false, and I was identified as a student exempt from military service because of ulcers.

It was two in the morning when I kissed my mother and Anna as they slept, slung the knapsack over one shoulder, and as softly as I could in my hiking boots, walked into the hallway.

Inga knew I was leaving. She came out of the apartment in her bathrobe. “So. You’ve made your mind up.”

“I can’t stay. I can’t help them. Maybe I can save my own neck, come back for them … I don’t know.”

“Where will you go?”

“Anywhere they can’t find me.”

“How will you live, Rudi?”

“Steal. Lie. Fight.”

She gave me a roll of marks. “Take this. At least—for a few days.”

I thanked her. We hesitated a moment, studying each other’s faces. We were a great deal alike, I now realize. Stubborn, resentful of being shoved around, ready to resist, to refuse to accept meekly what others forced on us. My parents never quite understood me. “A mutant,” my father used to say, “an intruder of some kind in this family of readers and artists.” (He said it jokingly, and his affection for me was never any less than it was for Karl and Anna.) In the same manner, Inga, having seen brutality and bloodshed as a child—her quarter was one of the worst for the terrible street fights of the twenties and thirties—had developed a dread, a hatred of violence, and of those who commit it.

And none of this had lessened her capacity for compassion, for kindness. I wondered, with a dread, wasting feeling, how Karl would manage in prison without her strength to sustain him.

“Rudi, you must write to us,” she said. “It will be a shock to your mother, but I will try to explain why you have left. And to Anna.”

“I won’t write for a while. Tell Mama not to worry about me, ever. Take care of her. Be good to Anna. She’s a fresh kid sometimes, but she loves you. As much as we all do.”

We kissed as brother and sister.

“If you see Karl, tell him I’m okay. Tell him the Weiss brothers will be together again … soon. Maybe Mama’s right. Maybe it’ll end. They’ll decide they’ve beaten us up enough, stolen all we have, and they’ll quit. Goodbye.”

She kissed me again, and I could hear her voice: “Goodbye, little brother.”

I walked down the tenement steps, through the courtyard and into the dark street. I had a whole set of lies ready if I were stopped. My plan was to ride the rails of a freight train, sneak on and off trains, and make my way south. Anywhere but Germany.

Berlin
September 1939

In twenty days, Poland has fallen.

But military success is not all we seek. The security of the conquered lands, the racial purity of that part of Poland which will be incorporated into Germany, the policies against Jews, Slavs and others in the “Government-General”—all these remain in a rather muddled state.

Our office keeps getting annoying reports about the actions against Jews in Poland.

It is not that the actions are against policy—Heydrich says we are fighting a double war, one against foreign armies, another against the Jewish conspiracy—but that they are haphazard, disorganized, piecemeal.

The beards and earlocks of these strange Orthodox eastern Jews seem to arouse our men. They cut them off, tear them off, burn them.

Jews are herded into synagogues and the buildings are set afire.

In Bielsko, Jews were strung up in the yard of a Jewish school, rubber hoses were shoved into their mouths, and the water turned on until their stomachs burst.

Rape is frequent, although the soldier who indulges his passion in this manner runs the risk of a charge of race defilement.

Jewish women are stripped and made to dance naked in the streets—to the amusement of the Poles as well as our SS men.

In one town, Jews were driven naked from a communal bath to a slaughterhouse, and burned alive.

One report says—I am asking someone to verify it, but I see no reason to disbelieve it—that in a Polish village, three rabbis were beheaded, and their heads displayed in the window of the local department store, owned, of course, by a Jew.

And so on. All disorganized, planless, at the whim of some local SS commandant.

“The army is somewhat annoyed,” I said to Heydrich, after reading the morning reports from Poland.

“Why should they be? Keitel himself, that whore, issued an order to his glorious army telling them that Jews are poisonous parasites, that they’re a plague to the world. I remember the field marshal’s precise words: ‘The fight against Jewry is a moral fight for the purity and health of God-created humanity.’ “

“Don’t misunderstand me, sir,” I said quickly. “It’s not the acts against Jews that bothers the army. It’s the undermining of army authority in occupied areas. Our men take precedence, commandeer equipment, give orders.”

“Well, the army will have to live with it. Let them conquer and occupy. We’ll handle the Jews and the other vermin.”

But he was disturbed, I could see.

In the next few hours, Heydrich, with that blazing, inventive mind of his, drew up a new formula for handling the Jews of Poland. They will be shoved out of the territories we take over, into places like Lublin and Warsaw, there to fester, as he put it, in their own communities. And the Jews themselves will handle the movement, the organization of these vast ghettoes. Jewish councils, consisting of the oldest and most influential members of the Jewish community, will do the work for us.

“If they refuse?”

“Jews don’t refuse. They cooperate. They are terrified, unarmed, without allies.”

Poland, it develops in Heydrich’s plan, will be a
vast dumping ground for the Jews of Europe—not just Polish Jews, but those remaining in Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia.

He asked me to summon all his aides to an important meeting tomorrow—September 21—to formulate precise plans for handling the Jewish question. Random shootings and hangings are no way of solving a mass campaign against a subtle enemy.

I have gotten to know the chief’s mind reasonably well, and every now and then I try to pierce it. “General, perhaps our problem is that very few of us have a clear idea of the ultimate goal regarding the Jews.”

“You tell me, Dorf.”

“Oh … elimination of their influence from Europe. From the world, for that matter.”

“And what does elimination mean? Sterilization? Banishment? Impoverishment?” He paused. “Extermination?”

“I don’t know. The last notion, that is. It’s only been hinted at.”

“Go back to the Führer’s works, Dorf. Read between the lines.”

“Yes, but the annihilation of what—eight million people or more—seems a rather large task, a bit impractical.”

My insides were shivering.

“One might argue that,” Heydrich said. “But for the purposes of tomorrow’s meeting, keep it in the back of your mind. I will talk about something called ‘planned overall measures’ leading to a final goal, as opposed to
stages
that will lead to this goal.”

Heydrich, for all his mastery of organization, of propaganda, of a complex police operation, can sometimes make me dizzy with his circuitous verbiage (although I have the feeling he’s learned some of it from me).