Holocaust (17 page)

In the weeks following Anna’s death, my mother
often seemed to be on the verge of losing her sanity. But whenever her hysteria would be at its worse, and Inga would grow concerned about her, that strength she held in reserve would surface, and she would force herself to maintain her balance by recalling Anna, Karl, me, my father.

“We will be together again,” she would say. “I know it. We will remember Anna. When Karl and Rudi have children, they will name a child for her. Inga, do you remember what a tease she was? How she used to play with Rudi? The games they invented?”

“I remember. We won’t forget our Anna.”

I did not learn of precisely how my sister died until several years later, when Inga unearthed the evidence.

Anna was one of 50,000 victims—Jew and Gentile—of the Nazi “euthanasia” program.

It was not a sanitarium she had been taken to at Hadamar, but one of the first gassing installations, a model for the structures later used to kill millions of Jews.

There were twelve of these places like Hadamar, and the state made the decision as to who should enter the gas chambers—without consulting the families of the doomed.

In this manner, cripples, the feebleminded, the retarded, paralytics, and so on were driven to these murder mills, stripped, dressed in paper wrappers, and gassed to death with the exhaust from huge internal-combustion engines.

These early gassings began sometime in 1938 and continued for a few years. A great deal of secrecy surrounded them, but word seeped out. In a sense, they were rehearsals for what was to become the pattern for the extermination of the Jews, and many others, a few years later.

In my research, I learned that when comfirmation of the killing of these “useless” people reached the Vatican, strong protests were made to Berlin. Protestant churchmen also raised their voices. Idiots, Mongoloids, cretins, the crippled, were also children of God, the
clergymen insisted. And so the “euthanasia” program was quietly phased out. But the plans were never set aside.

When the Jews were gassed by the millions there were no protests from the honorable clergy. Not a word. Except from a few brave men. One might count them on the fingers of one hand.

I find now that I must write about these matters as blandly and coldly as possible. Perhaps to keep myself from a lifetime of weeping over the murder of my beloved sister.

Berlin
November 1940

An anonymous caller informed my office yesterday, November 15, that a certain priest is delivering sermons aimed at subverting our racial policies.

The man’s name is Bernard Lichtenberg, and he is provost of St. Hedwig’s Cathedral. He is a plain, gray-haired fellow, in his middle sixties. I know little about his background, but what has impelled him to this rash course, I cannot imagine. The vast majority of churches, Catholic and Protestant, have either supported us or have been discreetly neutral.

Accordingly, I attended an evening service at St. Hedwig’s. (I am not a Catholic, nor have I been a practicing Christian of any kind since my childhood. My parents were Lutheran, but my father had small use for organized religions.)

The church was less than a third filled. Perhaps word had gotten around about Lichtenberg’s anti-state commentaries. Indeed, as his sermon progressed, following the mass, at least a half-dozen people got up and left.

The elderly priest was treading on dangerous
ground. I have nothing personal against the man, but anyone undermining our policies has to be stopped. Those are the orders from the top.

“Let us pray in silence,” Father Lichtenberg said, “for the children of Abraham.”

It was at this point that four or five people left. Others, quite obviously, held their heads up, and did not pray at all.

“Outside,” the priest went on, “the synagogue is burning, and that, too, is a house of God. In many of your homes, an inflammatory newspaper is circulated, warning Germans that if they exhibit false sentimentality to Jews, they commit treason. This church and this priest will pray for the Jews, for they suffer.”

More people got up and left.

“Do not let yourself be led astray by such unchristian thoughts, but act according to the clear command of Christ: ‘Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.’”

I waited until the service had ended, and then walked down the nave and into the sacristy. I was in civilian dress, feeling it a bit inappropriate to come to the mass in uniform. (Although many of our men are good Catholics or devout Protestants, and attend services in uniform all the time.)

Father Lichtenberg was having his vestments removed by an aged sacristan. I approached him and showed him my identity card and badge.

“Captain Erik Dorf,” he read. “How can I help you, my son?”

“I listened to your sermon with much interest.”

“And did you learn anything from it?”

“I learned that you are a kind-hearted man, but you are gravely misinformed.”

He looked at me with tired, sensitive eyes. I wished that I did not have to confront him. “I know what is happening to the Jews. And so do you, Captain.”

Rather than argue with him, I walked around the sacristy table, weighing my words. “Father, Pope Pius some years ago concluded a concordat with the Führer. The Vatican has said many times that it regards Germany
as Christian Europe’s last bastion against Bolshevism.”

“That does not justify the torture and murder of innocents, Captain.”

“No one is being tortured. I know of no murder of innocents.”

“I have seen the Jews beaten and defiled in the streets. I have seen them sent off to prison for no reason—”

“They are enemies of the Reich. We are engaged in a war, Father.”

“Against armies? Or against defenseless Jews?”

“I must appeal to you to be more temperate in your remarks, Father. Other churchmen have found no problem in reconciling their faith with us. In Bremen, last week, a new church was dedicated in the Führer’s name.”

He would not be sidetracked. “I have heard stories from our soldiers returned from Poland,” the priest said. “They go beyond the mere transportation of so-called alien races.”

“Confessions from battle-weary young men? You must take those stories lightly.”

“But as a priest I must listen, and give absolution. I will follow my conscience in these matters.”

He was a stubborn old fellow, decent enough, but blind to our aims, our goals. I bowed politely and told
him
not to let his conscience get him in trouble.

He thanked me and turned away. Then I heard him say to the sacristan, “Such an intelligent and charming young man. Our gift to the new age.”

I caught the sarcasm in his voice, and I made a mental note to put him under surveillance.

Eventually my mother was arrested and sent to Warsaw.

I think she was almost glad to have the ax fall. Although
she might have remained some months longer in Karl’s old studio, she was deteriorating under the loss of Anna, the absence of her sons and her husband. Perhaps she was “denounced” by someone in the Helms family. Inga swears her parents said nothing, although they made no secret of their hatred of my mother.

In any case, she was arrested in a general sweep of that quarter of the city, put on a freezing cattle car with hundreds of other Berlin Jews, most of them women and children, and sent to Warsaw.

My father was working in the children’s ward of the Jewish Hospital when he learned that a Berta Weiss, claiming to be his wife, had arrived at the Umschlagplatz, near the main rail station in the ghetto.

Max Lowy, the printer, my father’s old patient, came running in with the news. My father and a woman named Sarah Olenick, a nurse, were trying to find food and medicine for the sick children. They died every day, huddled around a cold stove, moaning, unable to resist the diseases that ravaged the ghetto.

Lowy insisted he had seen my mother. At once my father left the hospital and practically ran all the way to the registration office at the station.

And so they were reunited, more than a year after my father’s deportation.

Letters that my mother wrote to Karl (apparently never mailed, or returned, and saved by Inga) reveal the true depths of her emotions for my father. In front of the children, she was always restrained, very much the daughter of an old infantry officer.

But the letters were a different story. In one, she wrote:

My mother had always lacked the ability to show deep emotion, warmth, outwardly. An only child, raised in a hothouse atmosphere by strict parents, she was wary of kissing, hugging, let alone sexual suggestions in public.

But now she and my father kissed shamelessly, like young lovers. He joked about her insistence on standing on line to register, saying she was still the law-abiding Berliner. He assured her that even in the pitiful Warsaw ghetto, the bureaucracy was inept and she could wait a while to register, while they sat in what passed for a cafe, pretending they were at the Adlon Hotel.

“Where there are Jews, there must be places for people to sit, and hold hands, and talk,” my father said. “Even if it is a coffee house with no coffee.”

They looked at each other for a few moments. They had aged. The suffering had hurt them, etched lines in their faces.

“You are hiding something from me,” my father said. He knew her moods, her reactions.

“Josef … Anna is dead.”

She told him about the strange letter, about Anna’s death from pneumonia in the sanitarium. Inga had tried to learn more, find the grave, and had been rebuffed.

My father cried freely, unable to control his sorrow. My mother lied to him about the events that led to her death. He was told nothing of how she was raped and abused by drunken hoodlums, how this had caused her mental decline.

“It was painless,” my mother said. “The hospital people said the drugs dulled the pain, and that she died peacefully.”

“I can’t believe it,” he sobbed. “My child, my Anna. What in God’s name do they want of us? What tribute are they demanding? Our children’s lives?”

For a long time, he said nothing, bending his head, pressing his hands to his eyes, while my mother lied about Anna. He was too good a physician to accept the story that she had simply gone into a decline. Such mental collapses, he argued, trying to temper his bottomless sorrow with medical analysis, were usually set off by a trauma of some kind. Had something happened to Anna? No, my mother said—just a gradual depression.

“The life in her, the life in her,” he wept. “They killed it.”

He understood now that no indignity, no humiliation, no torture was to be spared us—the family Weiss, and the Jews of Europe. For the rest of his life, he would not be able to dispel the vision of his lost daughter.

My mother tried to divert him. She asked about conditions in the Warsaw ghetto. Was there work for him? Where would they live? With her infinite capacity for optimism, for seeing the bright side, she said she would volunteer to teach school. She had heard that the schools in the ghetto, for all the deprivation, were active, full of eager students. She would be happy to teach a music class, perhaps literature also.

My father agreed, but he could not let the subject of Anna alone. “I can’t believe she’s gone. You haven’t told me all. Where was this hospital? Who was the physician?”

She took his hand. “Josef, cry if you think it will help. But it will not bring our daughter back. Perhaps … perhaps … it is better.”

“Better? Life is always better than death.”

“I am not so sure. Don’t ask me anything else.”

“The boys?”

“Karl is still in prison. Yes, he’s alive, getting by. Inga says she is still trying to see him, to pull strings and get him freed.”

“Rudi?”

“Gone. Our wild one. Our street fighter. He vanished in the night, left me a note, and said we must not worry about him, but that he would not stay and let them arrest him.”

My father shook his head. “How I miss them. I never talked to them enough, spent enough time with them. How I wish they were with us, so I could make things up. I once disappointed Rudi so terribly. The first time he started at center in a big game. Sixteen years old, the youngest player on the team. And I ran off to some medical meeting. He said he didn’t care, but I knew he did.”

“We’ll make it up to them when this ends.”

“Yes, yes, of course we will. And we must not dwell on our misfortunes. There are hundreds of thousands worse off. We at least will have work, and enough to eat, and a place to live.”

They got up from the cafe, held hands like young lovers.

“Josef,” my mother said. “I have never loved you more.”

“Nor I you. Dear God, I look at you and I see Anna.”

“But you must not cry again.” She took his arm firmly. “Now you may take me to that elegant apartment.”

“I’m afraid it’s one room—over the old drugstore.” “And no piano? No Bechstein? I may leave you if there isn’t.”

“No piano,” my father said. “But memories of one.”

Some time before Christmas, Inga received a letter from Sergeant Heinz Muller, telling her to come to Buchenwald. He was vague, but he hinted that he might be able to arrange for her to see Karl. He could promise nothing, but he would at least try. And he ordered her to burn the letter.

My sister-in-law was a courageous and tenacious woman. She pretended to be a hiker, with boots, rucksack and staff, and approached the outer fences of the prison camp fearlessly. There is much to be said for a working-class background, for women who are independent and resourceful. Inga was ahead of her time.