Heidegger's Glasses: A Novel (4 page)

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Authors: Thaisa Frank

BOOK: Heidegger's Glasses: A Novel
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Take more! For Elie!
Another Scribe said the same thing and then another and another until Elie’s name rang all over the kitchen like an invocation. He cut more bread and thanked them in a dozen languages. They laughed and thanked him back.
Everyone spoke German, but conversations were filled with foreign words—Hungarian for shame (
szégyen
), Italian for ink (
inchiostro
), Polish for shadow (
cień
). Every week there were more words because the inhabitants—collectively—were fluent in forty-seven languages and dialects besides German. And this was why they’d been spared the camps and could be in this shell—fighting, scribbling, clawing, to carry out a mysterious and Byzantine mission.
My lovely Susanne,
I arrived last week and was lucky to get work building a road. The food is good and I like being out in the fresh air. There is good work for women, too—sewing uniforms, mending, typing. I know you would like it here.
Love,
Heinrich
Gerhardt Lodenstein was fluent in five languages but hadn’t needed to barter in any of them for his position as Obërst of the Compound: long ago, in return for a bicycle, he’d promised his father that he would enlist in the secret police, where his father was a prominent member. The secret police was called the Abwehr—a remote, elite organization expert in deciphering codes and known for its hatred of the Reich. Its head, Wilhelm Canaris, tried twice to assassinate Hitler before the war. When he joined, Lodenstein thought he’d spend two years learning codes, then practice law. But the Reich created its own secret police, shrinking the Abwehr, and reducing Gerhardt Lodenstein’s job to filing old papers from the First World War. Eventually Goebbels—with malice because he disliked Lodenstein’s father—enlisted him in the SS and made him the reluctant head of the Compound of Scribes, forcing him to oversee an absurd and useless project: answering letters to people who were dead.
These letters were part of a plan referred to as
Briefaktion
(Operation Mail), in which prisoners were forced to write to relatives, praising conditions in camps and ghettos. They were mailed to The Association of Jews in Berlin so no one knew where they came from.
Their purpose was to camouflage the fact that most of these people were about to be killed and encourage relatives to come to the camps voluntarily. They also served to dispel rumors about the camps. But the mail system was chaotic, and many relatives had been deported, no doubt forced to write letters themselves. So thousands of unread letters were returned to Berlin.
Himmler had forbade burning them: he believed in the supernatural with a vengeance, and thought the dead would pester psychics for answers if they knew their letters were destroyed—eventually exposing the Final Solution. Goebbels, who despised the supernatural, wouldn’t burn them for a different reason. He wanted each letter to be answered for the sake of record-keeping so there wouldn’t be any questions after the war. In order to look authentic, he decided the letters should be answered in their original language: hence the Compound motto
Like Answers Like
. The SS went to deportations to find the most fluent and educated to be Scribes.
Dearest Mishka,
Please don’t worry about us: The children are fine and the food is delicious—thick soup with dark bread. There’s also a beautiful forest here. They’re taking a group of us on a walk in a few minutes. You’ll have to join us, even if we won’t be here to welcome you.
Love,
Levka
When Operation Mail began, the Scribes lived in a bunker in Berlin. Facilities were cramped, the smell of cabbage was everywhere, but—as people liked to joke—they managed. Yet as more people were pulled from deportations, Goebbels worried that clotheslines, billowing in the middle of the city, would arouse suspicion and sent scouts to find an abandoned mine in the North German woods. There, with Hitler’s blessing, he enlisted the architect Hans Ewigkeit and transformed the mine to indulge his romantic notions. There was a rose-colored cobblestone street lit by tall gas lamps. There was a canopy of fake sky with a sun that rose and set, and stars that duplicated the constellations on Hitler’s birthday. There were mahogany doors and wrought-iron benches. The mine was sequestered by a narrow road and concealed by a shepherd’s hut.
The idea of answering the dead made Gerhardt Lodenstein queasy, and he became more so when he came to the Compound over a year ago and found it in chaos: the original Obërst, who, like Himmler, believed the dead were waiting for answers, was caught holding séances to contact them. This Obërst had been demoted to Major and hated Lodenstein for getting his room above the earth. Some Scribes wanted to leave the Compound, even though it meant almost certain death, and Himmler was starting to talk freely about the Final Solution he originally wanted to conceal. A week after Lodenstein arrived, Goebbels wrote that if he didn’t report to Berlin immediately he’d send him to the front. Lodenstein drove all night. By morning he was in the crimson halls of the new Reich Chancellery. Goebbels sat on books to look taller than five-feet-five and growled at Lodenstein to close the door.
You must know, he said in a low voice, that some people think the dead are waiting for answers and will hound us until they get them.
Lodenstein, who couldn’t decide what to say, didn’t say anything. Goebbels pounded his desk.
Of course you know. Don’t act like a moron.
He shoved over a pamphlet called
War Strategies from the Thule Society
. Lodenstein saw a list of names—Himmler, a few SS officers, and some famous mystics.
These idiots think they’re allied with the fucking beyond, and they meet to get advice about the war from the astral plane, said Goebbels. So a certain demoted Obërst may bother you about it. But remember there
is
no fucking beyond, and the dead can’t read. Make answers short, and keep that asshole from holding séances. This is just about record-keeping.
Lodenstein said, yes, of course he would, and Goebbels showed him a model of a building to exhibit the letters after the war. The building had Greek columns and marble nooks.
A mausoleum
, Lodenstein thought.
Only Elie saved Lodenstein’s life from complete absurdity. And since she did, he didn’t ask why she was rummaging near the telephone when he came back with breakfast. They huddled under the quilt and drank ersatz coffee, which they agreed was getting weaker and weaker, and talked about soldiers deserting, not enough food, accelerating chaos since Stalingrad. Elie leaned against him and said she was exhausted. He stroked her hair and asked—trying to sound casual:
Did anything happen at the border?
I already told you: They’ve stopped caring.
Then why an extra day?
The mother didn’t want to leave her kids, and there wasn’t room in the jeep. I had to find her a guide.
And the baker?
What do you mean
the baker
? He baked the bread because I got his niece to Denmark. Why do you grill me whenever I come back?
It was an old conversation. Elie flirted for favors. Lodenstein got upset. They had this conversation again and again, never resolved it, and never stopped loving each other. Elie’s voice was thin, as though she was about to cry. She threw down her napkin and took the mineshaft to the main room where she lit the lantern at her desk and wrote down supplies she hadn’t been able to get on her foray:
Kerosene. Wicks. Knäckebrot.
Then she made a list of people who might help find out whether the Angel of Auschwitz was real. She crossed out some names, added others, wrote the names in code, and crumpled the first piece of paper. Later she would burn it. Elie was always burning papers. No one in the Compound worried when they saw small fires in the forest.
While Elie worked, the Scribes played word games, wrote in diaries, and answered a few letters from Operation Mail. Sometimes they typed one or two obligatory sentences. Sometimes they answered at length, usually by hand, because something about the letter writer moved them. Maybe the handwriting reminded them of a parent. Or the writer mentioned a town they knew. Or the letter was written the day they’d been scheduled to be deported. They kept these letters for themselves and didn’t send them to be stored in crates. Now and then one of them came across a letter from someone they knew, and there was weeping, mayhem, and commotion. Not today, though. And Elie, as always, was composed.
Sophie Nachtgarten picked up her pen. She’d just read a letter from someone in the district of Fürth—the same district she’d lived in with her lover. There had been a lineup in their town square, and a guard shouted
stand straight!
in an accent Sophie recognized as Norwegian. On an impulse she’d said
of course
in Norwegian and was pulled from the line. It was a good guess—the guard had been raised in Norway. And while her lover was taken to the gallows, Sophie was pushed into a Kübelwagen.

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