Holocaust (26 page)

More photos of the Babi Yar action flashed on the screen. The photos of naked and semi-naked women always seem to linger a bit longer. Heydrich leans forward in his seat and studies them with what seems a bit more than professional interest. This is often the case at our screenings. Not only the chief, but quite a few of the men find stimulation in the sight of naked Jewesses about to die. An explanation, a generalization eludes me. Heydrich has a happy home life, a lovely wife, children. It is said he was cashiered from the navy early in his career for compromising an officer’s wife, but this hardly is in the area of sexual depravity.
Still, I’m forced to wonder if there might be some relationship between the kind of men we attract—on all levels—and the complex sexual needs of the human psyche.

Finally, Heydrich said that Ohlendorf was an admirable fellow.

“Ohlendorf had a few problems at first,” I said. “It was very odd, but the German colonists in the Crimea and even some of our Hungarian allies raised protests.”

“Did they?” He was staring at a well-formed Jewess, big-breasted, wide-hipped. Odd, how in seconds she would be dead.

“Yes. They said the Jews among them were entirely innocent, and Ohlendorf backed down—temporarily, of course. It’s rather strange. Whenever a local population or an allied unit protests, we seem to draw back—as if we were—I hate to say it—rather ashamed of our mission.”

Heydrich cocked his head. “Any such failures must be reported. Our mandate is clear.”

I told him how Ohlendorf, despite his tenacity in rounding up and resettling Jews, had actually spared the lives of some Jewish farmers in Bessarabia on economic grounds.

“Oh, I know about that,” Heydrich said. “Himmler visited the Crimea shortly after that, and Ohlendorf’s Jew farmers were included in the order. There are none left.”

Berlin
December 25, 1941

A marvelous Christmas!

How good to be back with the family in Berlin, to celebrate this holiest of days. After a final trip to the eastern front—shortened somewhat by the Red Army’s tenacious defense of Moscow, which temporarily halted our advance—I was given home leave.

I am exhausted. My tour of Russia has drained me. But it was a rewarding tour. The work of the Einsatzgruppen has exceeded expectations. Heydrich is pleased, but feels the need for a more comprehensive program. Still, 32,000 Jews have been eliminated in Vilna, 27,000 in Riga, 10,000 in Simferopol, and so on.

The only sobering note is that the United States has entered the war, following the Japanese attack on Hawaii. But no one is concerned over this. America is far, far away. They are, our intelligence says, utterly unprepared for war, and Roosevelt, under the influence of Jews, has made a blunder. Popular opinion in the United States will force him to undo his error. Moreover, the Americans may very well drive him from office if he continues on his reckless course. It is said there is a great deal of sympathy for Germany in the United States; Roosevelt may be impeached.

But none of these political or military matters concerned us tonight. We stood around our newest acquisition, a superb Bechstein piano, as Marta played, and we sang carols.

Peter, Laura, Marta, Uncle Kurt and I joined voices
happily as we sang
Tannenbaum, The Holly and the Ivy
, and
Bethlehem
. It was a wonderful, warm, endearing occasion. How much we love and respect one another!

Laura asked, “Papa, can we open presents?” She is a beautiful child—blond and fair like her mother, with a heart-shaped face.

And Peter: “Yes! Presents!” He is old enough to be a Hitler Jugend now, and proudly wore his uniform. (And was a bit annoyed with me for choosing to spend Christmas Eve in a plaid sports coat, rather than my uniform.)

“After the singing, children,” Marta said. “You know the rules—singing, cleaning up the table, cleaning the kitchen, then presents. Rewards only after duty.”

“Just like the army,” Kurt added. “Your father did his duties at the front, and now he is rewarded with a long vacation.”

“Quite correct,” I said. “Just as Mama got this present—this beautiful piano—for being so brave while I was away.”

Kurt, who has always had an eye for design and quality, ran his hand over the burnished mahogany surface of the Bechstein. “It’s magnificent. They say the tone of these Bechsteins improves with age.”

Marta played a few chords, reveling in the sounds. “I was stunned when the movers came with it. I couldn’t believe my eyes.”

Peter blurted out, “And it didn’t cost a penny!”

“Really?” asked Kurt.

“It was sitting, unplayed, in that clinic on Groningstrasse, in an upstairs room,” I explained. “The physician who runs the place, Dr. Heinzen, knows of my interest in music, and so he offered it to me.”

“Offered?” Kurt looked puzzled.

“In the interest of party unity. I was helpful in arranging for the good doctor to take the clinic over.”

Marta frowned. “I think it could use a tuning.”

“Oh,” Kurt joked. “Tuning a piano is no problem. Getting one is.”

My uncle seemed to have some fixation on the piano and kept asking questions about it. He is quite naive about the process by which the party rewards good workers, high-ranking officers. Peter suddenly blurted out—he must have overheard a conversation between me and Marta—that the piano once belonged to the Jewish doctor who lived over the clinic.

Kurt was about to ask another question, when Marta clapped her hands and said, “Intermission! Time to open presents!”

The children flew to the Christmas tree and began to tear their boxes apart, ripping paper, strewing ribbons on the floor. There was a pair of live white mice for Peter, in a huge wooden cage, something he had asked for, since he was very much interested in biology. Laura got some special gifts I had found in Russia—a Ukrainian rag doll, and one of those clever “Petrushka” dolls, a series of wooden figures each smaller than the one before, so they stack into a single form. They were both delighted.

For Marta, I purchased a magnificent silk robe edged with lace, from the special purchasing agent for the SS, who handles such things.

“Oh, Erik, it is so beautiful,” she said. She put it over her shoulders. It is the palest blue, almost as pale as her eyes. “Where did you ever get it? No shop in Berlin has anything like this!”

I kissed her cheek. “You won’t believe this, but they do this kind of elegant work in the camps.”

“The camps?” she asked.

“Yes. The detention centers. It’s a kind of therapy for offenders. Many of them are expert craftsmen, and it’s a shame to let their skills go to waste.”

Peter was playing with his mice. He had one in each hand. “I’ll name them Siegfried and Wotan,” he said.

“You’d better not,” I said. “One’s a female, the pet-store owner assured me. You’d better count on a Brunhilde.”

“Boy and girl?” Peter asked. “And they’ll have babies?”

“That’s right,” Marta said. “And you’d better keep your mouse family nice and clean, and inside the cage.”

Laura wailed. “My dolls can’t have babies! It’s not fair!”

I patted Laura’s silken hair. “Peter is a man, and older than you, Laura, and mother and I want him to learn about these things.”

“That’s right, darling,” Marta said. “The miracle of life. The goodness in all living things. We must respect it, even in a mouse, for they are God’s creatures.”

Kurt stoked his pipe, and through a haze of smoke looked at all of us, from some distance. An aging bachelor, he was somewhat out of it. “What a lovely concept, Marta,” Kurt said. “The miracle of life. What a beautiful thing to teach children.”

“Babies,” Peter said. “I can’t wait.” He shoved a mouse at Laura’s face, taunting her. “If they’re sick, I might give you one. Or I might kill the sick ones.”

“Mama, make him stop!” Laura wailed.

Peter chased her around the room, and I had to intervene, grabbing my son’s arm, cautioning him to be more gentle—and generous—with his sister.

Marta said, “The children are so tired, Erik. Why don’t we sing
Silent Night
, and they can go to bed, and then you and I and Kurt can listen to midnight mass on the radio.”

I turned to Kurt. “Uncle, you see how being married to an efficient administrator has made Marta equally efficient?”

“It may be the other way around, Erik,” he said. “Some of Marta’s efficiency has rubbed off on you.”

Again we gathered around the piano. We began to sing, but after a few bars, Marta stopped.

“That’s odd,” she said. “It’s making a funny sound on the lowest notes. As if the hammers or strings are broken. Something is muffling the tone.”

Kurt and I raised the huge mahogany cover to its highest position. My uncle peered into the inner workings of the piano, and fetched something out—what appeared to be pieces of cardboard.

“Photographs,” Kurt said. He dusted them off. There were three photos, all framed in the kind of heavy cardboard used by professional photographers.

“Oh! Pictures!” Peter cried. “Let’s see!”

“They were blocking the strings,” Marta said. “Throw them out.”

Kurt and I looked at the old photographs.

“Who are they, Papa?” Laura asked.

“Stupid,” said Peter. “The people who used to own the piano.”

I studied the photographs a moment. One was of Dr. Josef Weiss and a woman who must have been his wife, an attractive slender woman, smiling. They were dressed as if at a summer’s outing. There was a lake, possibly the ocean, in the background. There was also a photo of a young couple, obviously a wedding picture—a slender young man bearing a resemblance to the doctor, and a blond woman with a rather Aryan face. The third photo, smaller, and not at all professional-looking, was of a twelve-year-old girl in braids, with her arm around a rather rugged-looking boy of about sixteen. The boy wore a soccer shirt and seemed well-muscled.

“Yes, that looks like Dr. Weiss,” I said.

“And his family,” Kurt said.

“I’m scared. It’s like ghosts in the piano.” Laura looked at the photos, stuck her tongue out at them. “Ghosts!”

“Where are they all now, Erik?” asked Kurt.

“Oh, Weiss was deported years ago,” I said. “Not a bad sort of fellow, and a rather good doctor. But he was here illegally, a Pole, and he was breaking the law.”

“And the rest of his family?” my uncle asked.

“Not the faintest idea. They left Berlin years ago.”

Marta struck a loud chord. “We did not finish
Silent Night,”
she said. Then she asked for the photographs.

I thought for a moment she wanted to look at them also. But she gave them to Peter and said, “Burn them, Peter. In the fireplace, with the wrappings from the packages.”

That winter my mother became ill. There was nothing specifically wrong with her, I learned from Eva and other survivors, but she weakened, as did many in the ghetto, from the poor diet and the lack of medication.

According to my informants, my parents remained as devoted to each other as ever. My mother complained very little, but more and more, she had to forego her teaching—the music and literature lessons she gave, gratis, to the ghetto children.

One day, while a meeting of some key members of the council was taking place in the apartment adjoining my parents’ room, Eva heard my father taking my mother’s pulse, listening to her heart with a stethoscope. He was, as with all his patients, gentle, considerate, hopeful.

“What do you hear in my old heart?” she asked.

“Mozart,” Papa said.

And she laughed. “Full of your old tricks, the same old jokes.”

“We old general practitioners have a limited repertory. I still draw pictures of rabbits on my prescription pad to distract a child about to get an injection.”

They talked about her going back to the school. If she failed to come, many of the children ran off—to beg, to steal, to smuggle.

The talk of the schoolchildren reminded them of us—of me, of Karl, of Anna. My mother kept photographs of us tacked over her bed. Sometimes my father thought it was not a good idea for her to be constantly reminded of her lost family.

“Oh, but they give me hope, Josef,” she would say.

And he would play the game with her. He argued that anyone who was “useful” survived. “I’m a doctor, so I manage. Karl is an artist, they’ll use him. And Rudi …”

“Rudi will make his way, Josef. I have faith in him.”

Eva interrupted them to say that Uncle Moses had just sneaked back into the ghetto with a man from Vilna who had important information.

At that moment, my mother was talking to my father about some money that she had sewn into her old coat from Berlin. It was a kind of emergency fund, for God knows what purpose. But my mother had decided—knowing of the terrible condition in the children’s ward at the hospital—that my father should use the money to purchase food for the sick youngsters.

He nodded his agreement. With shears, she began to cut the lining of the coat.

“Someone wanting to sneak
into
our ghetto?” my father asked Eva.