Holocaust (37 page)

For a moment the old ghetto fear shaded his face; the fear of pain and torment and humiliation, which we have perfected, which we have made a national policy. (Heydrich, my mentor, understood this—the total modern state, the use of technology, the refusal to shrink from using any and all means to keep control, to bend wills, to force issues.)

But then he seemed to recover his courage, and he said, just as stubbornly as before, “There are no more pictures.”

I shook my head and walked back to Eichmann, who was now seated at the desk. “Useless.” I said.

Eichmann gave Rahm the order to take them away. They were marched out. The older man, Felsher, was weeping softly.

“You look as pale as they do,” Eichmann said.

“Do I?”

“Don’t let it upset you. Rahm’s guards will get the information. You can go back to Berlin a hero—with a collection of ghetto art under your arm.”

In April 1943, Karl and two other artists were interrogated by Eichmann and some other SS bigshots. None of them would talk. My brother, who shrank from street fights, ran from kids calling him dirty names, was defying these murdering sadists.

Inga recalls Karl and two other men, Emil Frey and Otto Felsher, being marched from the commandant’s office, shoved on a truck, and taken to the Kleine Festung—the isolation and punishment barracks.

She and Maria Kalova and some other women hurled themselves at the rear of the truck and tried to drag the men off. They were beaten back by kapos. An SS corporal fired shots over their heads.

Inga screamed that he had done nothing, that they must let him go, but the truck took off. Karl smiled at her and made a “thumbs up” signal. But all expected the worst. Few people ever came out of the Kleine Festung alive. A Hussite clergyman, a Czech suspected of contacting the resistance, had been tortured to death there a few weeks back.

The three men were put in separate but adjoining cells—iron doors with slots for food, one tiny high window, thick stone walls.

They were able to call to one another.

“What will they do to us?” Felsher cried.

“Beat us, I imagine,” Frey said. “Felsher, remember our agreement.”

“It … it was my fault. I had no right to sell the pictures.”

“You can make up for it now,” Karl said. “Just keep your mouth shut.”

“But I can’t stand pain, Weiss.”

“Neither can I,” Karl said. “But we’ll learn to.”

“I’m past sixty,” Felsher wept. “Weak kidneys. I’m no hero.”

Later, Inga told me, Karl realized his own surprising courage stemmed from his need to prop up Felsher; without Felsher to reassure, to encourage, he might have cracked.

“They won’t kill us,” Frey said.

“Yes, and they tell me that after a while, you don’t even notice it,” Karl added.

Felsher would not stop sobbing.

Karl rattled the iron door to get his attention. “Listen, Felsher, have you ever been to Italy?”

“No.”

“Frey?”

“No, Weiss, but it’s been a dream of mine for years.”

“Well, let’s make an agreement. When this is over all three of us will go there. Venice, Florence, Rome, Siena. I’ve always wanted to see Michelangelo’s David—not a photo or a copy, but the huge, real white thing, all by itself.”

Frey continued the game. “You’ve got a deal, Weiss. The three of us and our wives. Italy! Yes, an artist’s tour. We mustn’t forget Arezzo. I am a Piero della Francesca man myself. There, Weiss, is the greatest figure of the high Renaissance.”

My brother laughed. Felsher had stopped sobbing. “Well, I have a prejudice for Pinturicchio,” Karl said.

“Bah,” Frey said. “An illustrator. Not in the same class with Piero.”

Felsher was beaten first.

The guards stood him against the wall, with his back
to them, and slowly, methodically beat him with rubber clubs, starting at the back of his head, working their way down his back, buttocks, legs, feet.

He screamed, of course, and my brother and Felsher kept shouting at him not to say anything.

“To hell with them!” Karl shouted. “We’ve given in too long! Felsher, tell them to go to hell!”

At length his screams diminished. He must have fainted.

Karl was next.

The two SS men entered his cell. “Well, Jewboy? Want to go back to the commandant’s office and talk? You saw what we did to the old man.”

“It’s easier than getting hit,” the other said.

“I have nothing to tell you.”

They repeated the punishment with Karl. He was stripped, made to face the wall, as if having a chest X-ray taken—chin and chest against the stone, legs back, arms on hips.

They beat him for fifteen minutes, hard, punishing short blows against his head, back, kidneys, legs, genitals, feet. He screamed also. Frey shouted at him to be silent; not to surrender. And he was silent about the pictures. There were several hundred paintings and drawings—what the Nazis called “horror propaganda”—hidden about the camp. The artists were determined that they would not be found.

Frey was shouting, trying to make himself heard over Karl’s screams. “Florence!” he shouted. “Listen to me, Weiss! Venice, Perugia! We’ll spend a whole day in the Ufizzi Gallery! A day in the Bargello!”

Finally, Karl collapsed and slid to the floor. His back was a bloody mass of bruises.

“Talk?” a guard asked.

“No.”

“You will next time. Stand him up.”

They beat him again; he collapsed again.

They then did the same to Emil Frey, and he too refused to divulge any information about the works.

When the guards returned to Felsher’s cell, on the
assumption that a second beating would loosen his tongue, they found he was dead.

Apparently there was now a pause, as the SS men returned to Rahm’s office to report on Felsher’s death.

Inga and the other women, waiting outside the office, held back by the kapos, shrieked at the SS guards not to hurt the men again. No one learned immediately that Felsher had been beaten to death.

A guard grinned at Inga. “They’ll talk now. Talk or Auschwitz.”

In the Kleine Festung, Karl and Frey, soaked with blood, bruised so badly they could not move, heard the guards returning.

“They won’t kill us,” Frey whispered. “The idea of those drawings is driving them insane. They have to have them. The bastards have an unnatural fear of being found out. In their corrupted souls, Weiss, they know they are evil, and that they will be punished someday. So they will have to keep us alive.”

“I can’t hold out,” Karl muttered.

“I’m not sure I can. We’ll make it a contest, Weiss. Whoever can hold out the longest … he gets a free gondola ride in Venice.”

And so the beatings resumed. Every hour the guards returned. At the end of the day Karl and Frey were senseless, inanimate lumps of flesh, deformed, misshapen, their bodies screaming with pain, their faces twisted like gargoyles. But they had not talked.

But while this was going on, Inga and Maria Kalova had buried the last of the paintings. They were stored in waterproof metal containers, wrapped in waterproof paper. Then they were hidden in a dozen places—the vegetable garden, flower beds, an abandoned gravel pit. They would never be found until after the war, Inga was certain.

As the women tossed earth on the last of the works of the “Artists of Terezin,” Inga began to cry.

“Oh, Maria,” she said. “Does it mean anything? For them to suffer so over these pictures? Why don’t we just give them to the SS.”

“Karl believes in the pictures, Inga. They are the truths that the world will have to know.”

“I suppose so. But I tell you, I want to rush into the commandant’s office and say, ‘Here they are, give me my husband.’”

“He and Frey would prefer this. I know.”

“I hope so. Oh, I hope so.”

For four days Frey and my brother were beaten.

On the last day, Karl, through cracked lips, called hoarsely to Frey. “They broke my hands. All the fingers. Bones cracked.”

“Mine too,” Frey said.

“So we can’t paint again.”

“They’ll be finished with us soon. They know we won’t talk. They’ll get bored with the damned paintings and get on to something else.”

“Or kill us. Sometimes I wish they would.”

“No, no, Weiss. Hang on.”

“Frey? You hear me? I was a coward when I was a kid. Coward all my life. Cried the first day my mother took me to school. Maybe I’m making up for it.”

“You are, Weiss, you are.”

They talked again of Italy, discussed itineraries, and decided that Ravenna would be an obligatory stop. And Frey was right. The beatings finally ended. But they were kept in isolation, and never allowed to return to the studio.

Theresienstadt
April 1943

This ridiculous business with a handful of Jewish artists has ended, thank God. None of them will talk. Perhaps they are telling the truth. Perhaps there are no other drawings, and perhaps they have no contact with the outside.

Be that as it may, I have failed.

Eichmann keeps teasing me about having to confront the “big bear”—Kaltenbrunner—when I return to Berlin. It is a prospect that does not please me, and he knows it. To be done in, to be frustrated by three miserable Jewish daubers?

But he will have other things on his mind, and that may save my neck. The new camps are more than filling their schedules. I am told Hoess has perfected a system where 2,500 people can be handled at once; burning and burying of the ashes follows immediately.

The most recent offensive in Russia has failed. The Allies have all of North Africa, have invaded Sicily, and are dropping hints about the invasion of Europe.

Meanwhile, we obey orders, do our duty to Führer and Fatherland and proceed with the final solution.

Do I truly believe in it, or not? I must. I cannot stop now, cannot have second thoughts or repent, or cast doubts on our work.

But I am not pleased with this return trip to Berlin. Even my relationships with Marta are suffering because of the tension under which I am forced to work.

Still, I am always happy to see the children. They are good, and loyal, and always cheerful. I wish I could tell them we were winning the war.

I must now backtrack on my account of my parents’ fate in Warsaw and relate their involvement in the mass deportation of Jews from that city (as from all Polish ghettoes) to the death camps.

In the summer of 1942, the first orders were passed down from the SS commandant Hoefle to the Judenrat. Six thousand Jews a day were to be supplied for the transports to the east.

My father, Uncle Moses, and Dr. Kohn were among the officials notified of this action.

“But what do we tell these people?” asked my father.

“The truth,” Hoefle said. “They are going to a family camp in Russia. A work camp. Fresh air. Better food. Parents and children will be kept together. It is better than staying in this pesthole that you have let Warsaw become.”

My Uncle Moses said, “People may resist.”

Hoefle snickered. “You people haven’t resisted yet. You don’t know what it is to fight. And you realize, since the murder of Heydrich we can’t be as generous and gentle as we have been.”

My father did some calculating. “But at the rate of six thousand people a day, the ghetto will be emptied.”

“Nonsense,” Hoefle said. “We want to drain off the excess, make life easier for all of you.”

“How will selections be made?” asked Dr. Kohn.

“That’s your worry, not mine. But I want six thousand, and there will be an accurate head count, a list of every single name. If people fail to show up, they’ll be grabbed off the streets at random.” He smiled. “We might even start with a few of you.”

And so the trains began to leave Warsaw. It was
amazing how quickly the ghetto began to empty. In a month’s time. 180,000 people had been sent “east.” But life was no easier. The Germans had stopped all trade with the outside; food was scarcer, deaths from disease and starvation increased.

One night in September, Uncle Moses waited in the railyards, hiding in a tool shed.

A train returning from the “East” clanked in, stopped. Zalman, the union leader, rolled from under a freight car, sneaked along the siding, and found Moses.

“Well?” Moses asked.

Zalman took a moment to catch his breath. “Those trains are not going to Russia.” “Where, then?”

“Place called Treblinka. It’s three hours away. I checked the numbers on the wagons. Same trains that left yesterday are back today.”

“Treblinka? A work camp?”

Zalman shook his head. “A death factory. Polish Christians are sent to a work camp. The Jews go to this big building. The SS tell them it’s for delousing.”

“God in Heaven. What we suspected.”

“Fake signs everywhere, as if they were going to register the Jews for work after the delousing—hatmakers, tanners, ironworkers. They tell them, when you get your bath you’ll get your job assignment. But they never come out. They go in, and they are gassed.”

“You … saw this …”

Zalman nodded. “Got it from a kapo. He didn’t know who I was. Undress them, keep them waiting, herd them in. Women and children, old people, all of them. All of the Warsaw ghetto will end up there.”