A Death in Vienna (13 page)

The New Year comes, 1944 turns to 1945. We can sense Auschwitz is dying. We pray it will be soon. We debate what to do. Should we wait for the Russians to free us? Should we try to escape? And if we manage to get across the wire? Where will we go? The Polish peasants hate us just as much as the Germans. We wait. What else can we do?

In mid-January, I smell smoke. I look out the barracks door. Bonfires are raging all over the camps. The smell is different. For the first time, they’re not burning people. They’re burning paper. They’re burning the evidence of their crimes. The ash drifts over Birkenau like snowfall. I smile for the first time in two years.

On January 17, Mengele leaves. The end is near. Shortly after midnight, there is a roll call. We are told the entire Auschwitz camp is being evacuated. The Reich still requires our bodies. The healthy will evacuate on foot. The sick will stay behind to meet their fate. We fall into rank and march out in neat rows of five.

At one o’clock in the morning, I pass through the gates of hell for the last time, two years to the day after my arrival, almost two years to the hour. I am not free yet. I have one more test to endure.

The snowfall is heavy and relentless. In the distance we can hear the thunder of an artillery duel. We walk, a seemingly endless chain of half-humans, dressed in our striped rags and our clogs. The shooting is as relentless as the snow. We try to count the shots. One hundred…two hundred…three…four…five…. We stop counting after that. Each shot represents one more life extinguished, one more murder. We number several thousand when we set out. I fear we will all be dead before we reach our destination.

Lene walks on my left, Rachel on my right. We dare not stumble. Those who stumble are shot on the spot and thrown into a ditch. We dare not fall out of formation and lag behind. Those who do are shot, too. The road is littered with the dead. We step over them and pray we do not falter. We eat snow to quench our thirst. There is nothing we can do about the horrible cold. A woman takes pity on us and throws boiled potatoes. Those foolish enough to pick them up are shot dead.

We sleep in barns or in abandoned barracks. Those who cannot rise quickly enough when awakened are shot dead. My hunger seems to be eating a hole in my stomach. It is much worse than the hunger of Birkenau. Somehow, I summon the strength to keep placing one foot in front of the other. Yes, I want to survive, but it is also a matter of defiance. They want me to fall so they can shoot me. I want to witness the destruction of their thousand-year Reich. I want to rejoice in its death, just as the Germans rejoiced in ours. I think of Regina, flying at Mengele during the selection, trying to kill him with her spoon. Regina’s courage gives me strength. Each step is rebellion.

On the third day, at nightfall, he comes for me. He is on horseback. We are sitting in the snow at the side of the road, resting. Lene is leaning on me. Her eyes are closed. I fear she is finished. Rachel presses snow to her lips to revive her. Rachel is the strongest. She had practically carried Lene all that afternoon.

He looks at me. He is a Sturmbannführer in the SS. After twelve years of living under the Nazis, I have learned to recognize their insignia. I try to make myself invisible. I turn my head and tend to Lene. He yanks on the reins of his horse and maneuvers himself into position so he can look at me some more. I wonder what he sees in me. Yes, I was a pretty girl once, but I am hideous now, exhausted, filthy, sick, a walking skeleton. I cannot bear my own smell. I know that if I interact with him, it will end badly. I put my head on my knees and feign sleep. He is too smart for that.

“You there,” he calls.

I look up. The man on horseback is pointing directly at me.

“Yes, you. Get on your feet. Come with me.”

I stand up. I am dead. I know it. Rachel knows it, too. I can see it in her eyes. She has no more tears to cry.

“Remember me,” I whisper as I follow the man on horseback into the trees.

Thankfully, he does not ask me to walk far, just to a spot a few meters from the side of the road, where a large tree had fallen. He dismounts and tethers his horse. He sits down on the fallen tree and orders me to sit next to him. I hesitate. No SS man has ever asked such a thing. He pats the tree with the palm of his hand. I sit, but several inches farther away than he had commanded. I am afraid, but I am also humiliated by my smell. He slides closer. He stinks of alcohol. I’m done for. It’s only a question of time.

I look straight ahead. He removes his gloves, then touches my face. In two years at Birkenau, no SS man had ever touched me. Why is this man, a Sturmbannführer, touching me now? I have endured many torments, but this is by far the worst. I look straight ahead. My flesh is ablaze.

“Such a shame,” he says. “Were you very beautiful once?”

I can think of nothing to say. Two years at Birkenau has taught me that in situations like these, there is never a right answer. If I answer yes, he’ll accuse me of Jewish arrogance and kill me. If I answer no, he’ll kill me for lying.

“I’ll share a secret with you. I’ve always been attracted to Jewesses. If you ask me, we should have killed the men and utilized the women for our own enjoyment. Did you have a child?”

I think of all the children I saw going to the gas at Birkenau. He demands a response by squeezing my face between his thumb and fingers. I close my eyes and try not to cry out. He repeats the question. I shake my head, and he releases his grip.

“If you’re able to survive the next few hours, you might someday have a child. Will you tell this child about what happened to you during the war? Or will you be too ashamed?”

A child? How could a girl in my position ever contemplate giving birth to a child? I have spent the last two years simply trying to survive. A child is beyond my comprehension.

“Answer me, Jew!”

His voice is suddenly harsh. I feel the situation is about to spin out of control. He takes hold of my face again and turns it toward him. I try to look away, but he shakes me, compelling me to look into his eyes. I have no strength to resist. His face is instantly chiseled into my memory. So is the sound of his voice and his Austrian-accented German. I hear it still.

“What will you tell your child about the war?”

What does he want to hear? What does he want me to say?

He squeezes my face. “Speak, Jew! What will you tell your child about the war?”

“The truth, Herr Sturmbannführer. I’ll tell my child the truth.”

Where these words come from, I do not know. I only know that if I am to die, I will die with a modicum of dignity. I think again of Regina, flying at Mengele armed with a spoon.

He relaxes his grip. The first crisis seems to have passed. He exhales heavily, as if exhausted by his long day of work, then removes a flask from the pocket of his greatcoat and takes a long pull. Thankfully, he does not offer me any. He returns the flask to his pocket and lights a cigarette. He does not offer me a cigarette. I have tobacco and liquor, he is telling me. You have nothing.

“The truth? What is the truth, Jew, as you see it?”

“Birkenau is the truth, Herr Sturmbannführer.”

“No, my dear, Birkenau is not the truth. Birkenau is a rumor. Birkenau is an invention by enemies of the Reich and Christianity. It is Stalinist, atheist propaganda.”

“What about the gas chambers? The crematoria?”

“These things did not exist at Birkenau.”

“I saw them, Herr Sturmbannführer. We all saw them.”

“No one is going to believe such a thing. No one is going to believe it’s possible to kill so many. Thousands? Surely, the death of thousands is possible. After all, this was war. Hundreds of thousands? Perhaps. But millions?” He draws on his cigarette. “To tell you the truth, I saw it with my own eyes, and even I cannot believe it.”

A shot crackles through the forest, then another. Two more girls gone. The Sturmbannführer takes another long pull at his flask of liquor. Why is he drinking? Is he trying to keep warm? Or is he steeling himself before he kills me?

“I’m going to tell you what you’re going to say about the war. You’re going to say that you were transferred to the east. That you had work. That you had plenty of food and proper medical care. That we treated you well and humanely.”

“If that is the truth, Herr Sturmbannführer, then why am I a skeleton?”

He has no answer, except to draw his pistol and place it against my temple.

“Recite to me what happened to you during the war, Jew. You were transferred to the east. You had plenty of food and proper medical care. The gas chambers and the crematoria are Bolshevik-Jewish inventions. Say those words, Jew.”

I know there is no escaping this situation with my life. Even if I say the words, I am dead. I will not say them. I will not give him the satisfaction. I close my eyes and wait for his bullet to carve a tunnel through my brain and release me from my torment.

He lowers the gun and calls out. Another SS man comes running. The Sturmbannführer orders him to stand guard over me. He leaves and walks back through the trees to the road. When he returns, he is accompanied by two women. One is Rachel. The other is Lene. He orders the SS man to leave, then places the gun to Lene’s forehead. Lene looks directly into my eyes. Her life is in my hands.

“Say the words, Jew! You were transferred to the east. You had plenty of food and proper medical care. The gas chambers and the crematoria are Bolshevik-Jewish lies.”

I cannot allow Lene to be killed by my silence. I open my mouth to speak, but before I can recite the words, Rachel shouts, “Don’t say it, Irene. He’s going to kill us anyway. Don’t give him the pleasure.”

The Sturmbannführer removes the gun from Lene’s head and places it against Rachel’s. “You say it, Jewish bitch.”

Rachel looks him directly in the eye and remains silent.

The Sturmbannführer pulls his trigger, and Rachel falls dead into the snow. He places the gun against Lene’s head, and once again commands me to speak. Lene slowly shakes her head. We say goodbye with our eyes. Another shot, and Lene falls next to Rachel.

It is my turn to die.

The Sturmbannführer points the gun at me. From the road comes the sound of shouting. Raus! Raus! The SS are prodding the girls to their feet. I know my walk is over. I know I am not leaving this place with my life. This is where I will fall, at the side of a Polish road, and here I will be buried, with no mazevoth to mark my grave.

“What will you tell your child about the war, Jew?”

“The truth, Herr Sturmbannführer. I’ll tell my child the truth.”

“No one will believe you.” He holsters his pistol. “Your column is leaving. You should join them. You know what happens to those who fall behind.”

He mounts his horse and jerks on the reins. I collapse in the snow next to the bodies of my two friends. I pray for them and beg their forgiveness. The end of the column passes by. I stagger out of the trees and fall into place. We walk that entire night, in neat rows of five. I shed tears of ice.

Five days after walking out of Birkenau, we come to a train station in the Silesian village of Wodzislaw. We are herded onto open coal cars and travel through the night, exposed to the vicious January weather. The Germans had no need to waste any more of their precious ammunition on us. The cold kills half of the girls on my car alone.

We arrive at a new camp, Ravensbrück, but there is not enough food for the new prisoners. After a few days, some of us move on, this time by flatbed truck. I end my odyssey in a camp in Neüstadt Glewe. On May 2, 1945, we wake to discover that our SS tormentors have fled the camp. Later that day, we are liberated by American and Russian soldiers.

It has been twelve years. Not a day passes that I don’t see the faces of Rachel and Lene—and the face of the man who murdered them. Their deaths weigh heavily upon me. Had I recited the Sturmbannführer’s words, perhaps they would be alive and I would be lying in an unmarked grave next to a Polish road, just another nameless victim. On the anniversary of their murders, I say mourner’s Kaddish for them. I do this out of habit but not faith. I lost my faith in God in Birkenau.

My name is Irene Allon. I used to be called Irene Frankel. In the camp I was known as prisoner number 29395, and this is what I witnessed in January 1945, on the death march from Birkenau.

I
T WAS
S
HABBAT
. Shamron ordered Gabriel to come to Tiberias for supper. As Gabriel drove slowly along the steeply sloped drive, he looked up at Shamron’s terrace and saw gaslights dancing in the wind from the lake—and then he glimpsed Shamron, the eternal sentinel, pacing slowly amid the flames. Gilah, before serving them food, lit a pair of candles in the dining room and recited the blessing. Gabriel had been raised in a home without religion, but at that moment he thought the sight of Shamron’s wife, her eyes closed, her hands drawing the candlelight toward her face, was the most beautiful he’d ever seen.

Shamron was withdrawn and preoccupied during the meal and in no mood for small talk. Even now he would not speak of his work in front of Gilah, not because he didn’t trust her, but because he feared she would stop loving him if she knew all the things he had done. Gilah filled the long silences by talking about her daughter, who’d moved to New Zealand to get away from her father and was living with a man on a chicken farm. She knew Gabriel was somehow linked to the Office but suspected nothing of the true nature of his work. She thought him a clerk of some sort who spent a great deal of time abroad and enjoyed art.

She served them coffee and a tray of cookies and dried fruit, then cleared the table and saw to the dishes. Gabriel, over the sound of running water and clinking china emanating from the kitchen, brought Shamron up to date. They spoke in low voices, with the Shabbat candles flickering between them. Gabriel showed him the files on Erich Radek and
Aktion
1005. Shamron held the photograph up to the candlelight and squinted, then pushed his reading glasses onto his bald head and settled his hard gaze on Gabriel once more.

“How much do you know about what happened to my mother during the war?”

Shamron’s calculated look, delivered over the rim of a coffee cup, made it plain there was nothing he did not know about Gabriel’s life, including what had happened to his mother during the war. “She was from Berlin,” Shamron said. “She was deported to Auschwitz in January 1943 and spent two years in the women’s camp at Birkenau. She left Birkenau on a death march. Unlike thousands of others, she managed to survive and was liberated by Russian and American troops at Neüstadt Glewe. Am I forgetting anything?”

“Something happened to her on the death march, something she would never discuss with me.” Gabriel held up the photograph of Erich Radek. “When Rivlin showed me this at Yad Vashem, I knew I’d seen the face somewhere before. It took me a while to remember, but finally I did. I saw it when I was a boy, on canvases in my mother’s studio.”

“Which is why you went to Safed, to see Tziona Levin.”

“How do you know?”

Shamron sighed and sipped his coffee. Gabriel, unnerved, told Shamron about his second visit to Yad Vashem that morning. When he placed the pages of his mother’s testimony on the table, Shamron’s eyes remained fixed on Gabriel’s face. And then Gabriel realized that Shamron had read it before. The
Memuneh
knew about his mother. The
Memuneh
knew everything.

“You were being considered for one of the most important assignments in the history of the Office,” Shamron said. His voice contained no trace of remorse. “I needed to know everything I could about you. Your army psychological profile described you as a lone wolf, egotistical, with the emotional coldness of a natural killer. My first visit with you provided confirmation of this, though I also found you unbearably rude and clinically shy. I wanted to know why you were the way you were. I thought your mother might be a good place to start.”

“So you looked up her testimony at Yad Vashem?”

He closed his eyes and nodded once.

“Why didn’t you ever say anything to me?”

“It wasn’t my place,” Shamron said without sentiment. “Only your mother could tell you about such a thing. She obviously carried a terrible burden of guilt until the day she died. She didn’t want you to know. She wasn’t alone. There were many survivors, just like your mother, who could never bring themselves to truly confront their memories. In the years after the war, before you were born, it seemed as though a wall of silence had been erected in this country.
The Holocaust?
It was discussed endlessly. But those who actually endured it tried desperately to bury their memories and move on. It was another form of survival. Unfortunately, their pain was passed on to the next generation, the sons and daughters of the survivors. People like Gabriel Allon.”

Shamron was interrupted by Gilah, who poked her head into the room and asked whether they needed more coffee. Shamron held up his hand. Gilah understood they were discussing work and slipped back into the kitchen. Shamron folded his arms on the table and leaned forward.

“Surely you must have suspected she’d given testimony. Why didn’t that natural curiosity of yours lead you to Yad Vashem to have a look for yourself?” Shamron, greeted only by Gabriel’s silence, answered the question for himself. “Because, like all children of survivors, you were always careful not to disturb your mother’s fragile emotional state. You were afraid that if you pushed too hard, you might send her into a depression from which she might never return?” He paused. “Or was it because you feared what you might find? Were you actually
afraid
to know the truth?”

Gabriel looked up sharply but made no reply. Shamron contemplated his coffee for a moment before speaking again.

“To be honest with you, Gabriel, when I read your mother’s testimony, I knew that you were perfect. You work for me because of her. She was incapable of loving you completely. How could she? She was afraid she would lose you. Everyone she’d ever loved had been taken from her. She lost her parents on the selection ramp and the girls she befriended at Birkenau were taken from her because she would not say the words an SS Sturmbannführer wanted her to say.”

“I would have understood if she’d tried to tell me.”

Shamron slowly shook his head. “No, Gabriel, no one can truly understand. The guilt, the shame. Your mother managed to find her way in this world after the war, but in many ways her life ended that night on the side of a Polish road.” He brought his palm down on the table, hard enough to rattle the remaining dishes. “So what do we do? Do we wallow in self-pity, or do we keep working and see if this man is truly Erich Radek?”

“I think you know the answer to that.”

“Does Moshe Rivlin think it’s possible Radek was involved in the evacuation of Auschwitz?”

Gabriel nodded. “By January 1945, the work of
Aktion
1005 was largely complete, since all of the conquered territory in the east had been overrun by the Soviets. It’s possible he went to Auschwitz to demolish the gas chambers and crematoria and prepare the remaining prisoners for evacuation. They were, after all, witnesses to the crime.”

“Do we know how this piece of filth managed to get out of Europe after the war?”

Gabriel told him Rivlin’s theory, that Radek, because he was an Austrian Catholic, had availed himself of the services of Bishop Aloïs Hudal in Rome.

“So why don’t we follow the trail,” Shamron said, “and see if it leads back to Austria again?”

“My thoughts exactly. I thought I’d start in Rome. I want to have a look at Hudal’s papers.”

“So would a lot of other people.”

“But they don’t have the private number of the man who lives on the top floor of the Apostolic Palace.”

Shamron shrugged. “This is true.”

“I need a clean passport.”

“Not a problem. I have a very good Canadian passport you can use. How’s your French these days?”

“Pas mal, mais je dois pratiquer l’accent d’un Quebecois.”

“Sometimes, you frighten even me.”

“That’s saying something.”

“You’ll spend the night here and leave for Rome tomorrow. I’ll take you to Lod. On the way we’ll stop at the American Embassy and have a chat with the local head of station.”

“About what?”

“According to the file from the Staatsarchiv, Vogel worked for the Americans in Austria during the occupation period. I’ve asked our friends in Langley to have a look through their files and see if Vogel’s name pops up. It’s a long shot, but maybe we’ll get lucky.”

Gabriel looked down at his mother’s testimony:
I will not tell all the things I saw. I cannot. I owe this much to the dead….

“Your mother was a very brave woman, Gabriel. That’s why I chose you. I knew you came from excellent stock.”

“She was much braver than I am.”

“Yes,” Shamron agreed. “She was braver than all of us.”

B
RUCE
C
RAWFORD’S REAL
occupation was one of the worst-kept secrets in Israel. The tall, patrician American was the chief of the CIA’s Tel Aviv station. Declared to both the Israeli government and the Palestinian Authority, he often served as a conduit between the two warring sides. Seldom was the night Crawford’s telephone didn’t ring at some hideous hour. He was tired, and looked it.

He greeted Shamron just inside the gates of the embassy on Haraykon Street and escorted him into the building. Crawford’s office was large and, for Shamron’s taste, overdecorated. It seemed the office of a corporate vice president rather than the lair of a spy, but then that was the American way. Shamron sank into a leather chair and accepted a glass of chilled water with lemon from a secretary. He considered lighting a Turkish cigarette, then noticed the N
O
S
MOKING
sign prominently displayed on the front of Crawford’s desk.

Crawford seemed in no hurry to get down to the matter at hand. Shamron had expected this. There was an unwritten rule among spies: When one asks a friend for a favor, one must be prepared to sing for his supper. Shamron, because he was technically out of the game, could offer nothing tangible, only the advice and the wisdom of a man who had made many mistakes.

Finally, after an hour, Crawford said, “About that Vogel thing.”

The American’s voice trailed off. Shamron, taking note of the tinge of failure in Crawford’s voice, leaned forward in his chair expectantly. Crawford played for time by removing a paper clip from his special magnetic dispenser and industriously straightening it.

“We had a look through our own files,” Crawford said, his gaze downward at his work. “We even sent a team out to Maryland to dig through the Archives annex. I’m afraid we struck out.”

“Struck out?” Shamron considered the use of American sports colloquialisms inappropriate for a business so vital as espionage. Agents, in Shamron’s world, did not strike out, fumble the ball, or make slam dunks. There was only success or failure, and the price of failure, in a neighborhood like the Middle East, was usually blood. “What does this mean
exactly
?”

“It means,” Crawford said pedantically, “that our search produced nothing. I’m sorry, Ari, but sometimes, that’s the way it goes with these things.”

He held up his straightened paper clip and examined it carefully, as though proud of his accomplishment.

G
ABRIEL WAS WAITING
in th
e back seat of Shamron’s Peugeot.

“How did it go?”

Shamron lit a cigarette and answered the question.

“Do you believe him?”

“You know, if he’d told me that they’d found a routine personnel file or a security clearance background report, I might have believed him. But
nothing
? Who does he think he’s talking to? I’m insulted, Gabriel. I truly am.”

“You think the Americans know something about Vogel?”

“Bruce Crawford just confirmed it for us.” Shamron glared at his stainless-steel watch. “Damn! It took him an hour to screw up the nerve to lie to me, and now you’re going to miss your flight.”

Gabriel looked down at the telephone in the console. “Do it,” he murmured. “I dare you.”

Shamron snatched up the telephone and dialed. “This is Shamron,” he snapped. “There’s an El Al flight leaving Lod for Rome in thirty minutes. It has just developed a mechanical problem that will require a one-hour delay in its departure. Understand?”

T
WO HOURS LATER
, Bruce Crawford’s telephone purred. He brought the receiver to his ear. He recognized the voice. It was the surveillance man he had assigned to follow Shamron. A dangerous game, following the former chief of the Office on his own soil, but Crawford was under orders.

“After he left the embassy, he went to Lod.”

“What was he doing at the airport?”

“Dropping off a passenger.”

“Did you recognize him?”

The surveillance man indicated that he did. Without mentioning the passenger’s name, he managed to communicate the fact that the man in question was a noteworthy Office agent, recently active in a central European city.

“Are you sure it was him?”

“No doubt about it.”

“Where was he going?”

Crawford, after hearing the answer, severed the connection. A moment later, he was seated before his computer, punching out a secure cable to Head quarters. The text was direct and terse, just the way the addressee liked it.

Elijah is heading to Rome. Arrives tonight on El Al flight from Tel Aviv.