Holocaust (41 page)

Uncle Sasha and the others came racing out of the shadows.

“Yuri and your men, the back door,” Sasha said. “The rest of us, in the front. Go in firing, but for God’s sake don’t hit one another.”

We plunged into the main room of the hall, without warning, without a word.

There were a dozen German officers in the room, and perhaps an equal number of women. A young lieutenant was playing the piano.

They all seemed weary, sated. It was not a very happy New Year’s party; and we did not make it any happier.

Uncle Sasha fired the first bursts and killed three men near the door. Yuri shot the man at the piano,
and he fell noisily on the keyboard. The women shrieked. Some—men and women—fell to the floor. A captain rose, holding his hands high.

Uncle Sasha grabbed him by the collar. “The gun room.”

“All right. Don’t kill us.”

“Fast. Yuri, guard the others. Everyone else with me.”

The captain—he had been slightly wounded in the arm—unlocked the gun rack. We festooned ourselves with machine pistols, rifles, handguns. Each of us took as much ammunition as we could carry. There was a medicine chest, and we took that also.

“Can you manage that, Weiss?” Sasha asked me. He was pointing to a light machine gun.

“I’ll try.” I picked it up, balanced it on my shoulders and followed them into the main room.

Inside, Yuri had started to bind the hands of the remaining Germans. But Sasha was in a hurry. “There’s a faster way,” he said.

He led us through the door. Then he ordered us to hurl grenades into the headquarters. We did. The explosions lit up the whole village; we knew that the soldiers at the main barracks would be on our tail any minute.

We began to run.

I felt the bullet slam into my shoulder. My back turned wet, warm. I got to my feet, but had to drop the machine gun. Yuri and another man helped me. When we got back to the camp, I was in a dead faint.

I next remember Uncle Sasha cutting my clothing away. I was on my side. The disinfectant clogged my nose, burned my back.

Then I heard a snipping, and the pain in my shoulder became unbearable. I howled. And on top of my howling, I could hear Helena screaming.

“Stop! Stop! You’re hurting him!”

She ran to the opposite side of the cot and began to kiss me, but she kept shrieking.

Uncle Sasha’s voice boomed over her screams. “Quiet! Get away from him, or I’ll throw you out, wife or no!”

“You’ll kill him with your damned stupid raids!” Helena yelled.

“How is it, Weiss?” he asked.

“It hurts like hell.”

“I’ve almost got the bullet out. We can’t spare the morphine for this kind of thing. Hang on, you’ll be all right.”

The snipping and clicking of Sasha’s medical instruments bothered me almost as much as the pain. Until he began to probe deeply, stabbing at nerves. The disinfectant, some kind of potent Red Army concoction, helped. My mind was so distracted by its harsh odor that I gritted my teeth and grunted, determined I would not scream.

My father, examining my bruises once after a rough game played in the mud, decided I had a high threshold for pain; I could take a great deal. “It’s common among athletes,” Papa said, smiling. And almost added—“and those who are less intelligent and sensitive.” But I’m sure he didn’t mean that. It was simply that I was
expected
to be the family roughneck, and I obliged. Just as now, with a bit of male bravado, in front of my wife, I would not yell, howl, or complain.

Helena wept, sat down on the edge of the cot and kissed the back of my neck.

“Worse pain once,” I chattered. “Worse … broke my ankle … didn’t play a whole year.”

Sasha growled at her. “Get out of my way, dammit.”

“No.”

“Then it’ll take longer and he’ll suffer more.”

Yuri, standing to one side, staring at my blood staining the blankets, tried to calm everyone. “It was worth it. One man wounded. And what a haul—rifles, machine guns, ammo. We must have killed eight of them.”

Helena jumped from the cot. “I don’t give a damn about your haul!”

“Ah, hell, it’s still bleeding,” Sasha said. “Hand me one of those bandage packs.”

He worked on me for another fifteen minutes. Helena refused to leave the cot, stroking my head, kissing me. Finally, Sasha held up the misshapen slug. He had swathed my back in bandages.

“There it is, Weiss,” he said. “From a Mauser. Something to show your grandchildren.”

Yuri laughed. “Have it gold-plated.”

Helena grabbed it from Uncle Sasha’s hand and hurled it against the wall. “Stop! Stop! I hate all of you! I can’t stand this damned joking, as if it were some kind of game! Sure it’s a game—but one we can never win! He’s almost bleeding to death and you make jokes about the bullet that almost killed him! I’m sick of this camp, and this useless war and the way you think you’re accomplishing something. So you kill a German here, a Ukrainian there—what of it? One day we’ll all be dead … one winter more will kill us all…

Her voice became a choked, heaving sob. She fell on her knees and began beating the icy logs of the hut, screaming all the time that we were all doomed, that we might as well give ourselves up to the Germans.

“I don’t want any more … I don’t want any more …” she kept sobbing. “No more … no more …”

Uncle Sasha assembled his medical kit and nodded at Yuri, as if to say, “This is between man and wife.” They started for the door. I turned painfully on my elbow.

“You did that almost as good as my father,” I said. “Nobody could tape the way he could.”

Sasha smiled at me. “Sorry I never met him. Maybe someday. I’ll see if we have anything to help you sleep. You may have to settle for the last of the cognac.”

They left. Helena crouched in a corner, wiping her tears away.

“Come to me,” I said.

She got up, came to the cot, and sat beside me again. Even in bulky winter clothing, felt boots, she was beautiful. Her hair had been cut short. Her face had seen no makeup for years. And still she shone, a woman to be stared at, desired, loved.

“Oh, Rudi… you could have died. And for what?”

I held her hand. “To show them we are not cowards. That they can’t keep killing us and get away with it.”

“But they are killing millions, we know it. And so few fight, so few escape.”

“All the more reason for us to fight them.”

We said nothing for a while. She rested her head on my chest, and I stroked her cropped hair, kissed her ear. Each move sent a jolt of pain through my shoulder and arm, but at least the bleeding seemed to have stopped.

“Tell me again how much you love me,” I said.

“More than ever.” Then she began to cry again. “But they’ll come looking for us. They’ll know where we are. Someone will tell, someone will be tortured. Then we will all be—”

“You once said we’d never die.”

“I don’t believe it any more,” my wife said.

“We’ll live, you’ll see. You’ll meet my parents, Karl, Inga. And they’ll all love you as much as I do. They’ll joke about a Czech in the family, but it’ll just be a joke.”

She smiled at last, stroked my forehead. I was afraid then, afraid of dying, and so was she. We loved each other too much. The enemy would make sure that our love would be killed. But we dared not tell each other how afraid we were. It was wrong of me to talk about my family, and happy reunions. It made it harder to deceive ourselves.

Finally, she looked up. “Rudi, I have something to ask of you.”

“Anything.”

“The next time you go out to fight with Sasha and the men, I want to go along.”

“Oh, no.”

“Some of the women do. Nadya does.” “Not my wife.”

“But I must. I must be with you all the time.”

Her eyes were solemn, shadowed. It had been four years that we had been together, and it was a lifetime. We had suffered much, seen horrors, survived, fought, and learned to be passionate, tender, understanding.
And most of all to read each other’s minds. We could hide nothing from each other, nothing. I knew what she meant. There was a good chance the Nazis would catch us someday. They and their local allies were determined to wipe us out. It was reported that a Waffen SS battalion, had been brought into the area, to find us and crush us.

Our luck might run out someday. Helena was telling me—I knew it, I saw it in her face—that she wanted to die with me.

“I’ll talk to Sasha about it,” I said.

Sasha came in with the cognac. He patted Helena’s head. “Visiting hours are over. Patient has to get his sleep.”

For reasons that I still do not understand, my brother Karl was permitted to live for several months in the isolation of the Kleine Festung.

In that curious, unpredictable way in which the Nazi bureaucracy worked, both he and Frey were beaten from time to time, and Frey died after a few weeks. But Karl stayed alive—barely—in a dark cell. He was almost a skeleton, his eyes unaccustomed to light, his voice reduced to a croak. And his hands, the hands of an artist, were two deformed lumps of flesh and bone.

One day the guard came and unlocked his cell.

“Let’s go, Weiss.”

“Don’t beat me again,” he begged. “I’ll die this time.”

“No more beatings. You’re luckier than your friends Frey and Felsher.”

“You killed them.”

“They wouldn’t talk.”

“I won’t either.”

The guard shrugged. “Who cares any more? They’re sending you to Auschwitz. Lovely place, nicer than here. A family camp. They treat the Jews better there than the Germans get treated in Berlin.”

Some truly lunatic business followed. Karl was marched into the office of Commandant Rahm and
made to sign a “confession” admitting certain crimes against the Reich. Rahm said that when the war ended, he, Karl Weiss, artist of Berlin, Jew, would have to stand trial for “serious crimes against the German people.” Karl signed. What did it matter? He was already one of the, walking dead—what long-term inmates called a “Mussulman.”

Then he was told he had a half-hour to see his wife before being put aboard the transport for the “east.” Theresienstadt was now in the process of being emptied. Every day trains left for some destination in Poland. It was Auschwitz, of course, and everyone was assured it was a “family camp,” that there they would be joined—parents, children, old folks—and be given fruitful work, good food, a decent home to live in.

When Karl staggered into the studio for the last time, Inga let out a cry. His striped uniform hung loosely on his frame. He was bearded, hollow-eyed, bent over like an aged cripple. Spittle kept forming in the corners of his mouth.

She hugged him. Maria Kalova and a few of the artists who had not been involved in the conspiracy came forward.

“Oh, they have let you free, Karl,” Inga said. She and Maria led him to a chair, found some tea for him. He tried to hide his hands when they offered him the metal cup.

“Oh, my beloved Karl,” she cried. “What they have done to you … your hands.”

The others were ashamed to look on. They moved away. Maria went to her drafting table. The SS kept them at work turning out “morale” posters, warnings to behave, promises of wonderful days to come.

“I am still alive,” Karl said. His voice was lost, distant. “I never told them. Are the paintings safe?”

“Yes,” she whispered. “Maria and I hid them.”

He nodded. “I’ll never paint again. They made sure of that.”

Inga grasped his broken hands and began to kiss them.

“You can’t make them well again. The way my mother
used to kiss my bruises when I was a little boy. It didn’t work then.” He looked at his hands. “They say one gets used to it. But you never do.”

“Don’t talk about it.” On her knees, she put her face against his hands.

“In the Kleine Festung, to keep from going crazy when they beat us, Frey and Felsher and I kept shouting that we would go to Italy. Florence, Venice. Frey insisted on Arezzo, too.”

“We’ll go there, dearest Karl, I promise.”

He shivered, hunched over, rested his head on her yellow hair. “We will never see Italy as man and wife. My brief moments of courage are over.” He sat up. “They’re sending me to Auschwitz. They’re finished with me. I suppose I’m not even worth killing, the way they murdered Frey and Felsher.”

“You won’t leave,” she said. “If they send you, I’ll go also.”

He shook his head.

Maria Kalova left her table and walked over to them. She looked at them for a moment, then said: “You can’t, Inga. You must tell Karl.”

“Tell me … ?”

“At least, here in Theresienstadt, you have a chance, Inga,” Maria went on. “You can work, they will spare you, but…”

“What are you talking about?” asked Karl.

Inga looked up at him. “Karl. Your child is in me.”

“Child … ?”

“Ours.”

He began to tremble again, shoved the teacup away, held her at arm’s length. His arms were like thin pipes. “No. You mustn’t have it.”

“But I will. That is why Maria says I must stay here. Children have been born here. At least there is a clinic, and they will look after me.”

“I’ve seen the children born here,” he said. “They’re cursed for the rest of their lives. Their eyes show it.”

“It need not be that way.”

Maria stepped forward. “The women will protect Inga, as long as they can. We’ll be good to the child.”

“No,” my brother said. “If you love me, end its life before it opens its eyes in this damned place.”

“No, I won’t. I want your blessing. I want you to sanctify its life. Oh, Karl, I sometimes think I am more of a Jew than you, or Rudi…”

“I want no child born here.”

“The rabbis say each life makes God’s name holy. Please, Karl.”

“They did not see Theresienstadt.”

Maria said, “Karl, she is right. You must let Inga have her baby.”

He lowered his head to his hands. “All right. It doesn’t matter. It’s a child I’ll never know.”

Inga said, “But you will. I promise you.”

A kapo entered, stopped in the doorway. He was rounding up people for the transport. He said nothing.

Karl looked at him, got slowly to his feet. He whispered to Inga, “When the child is old enough, show him the paintings. So he will understand.”