Holocaust (12 page)

“How clear … how precise will you make all of this at tomorrow’s meeting?” I asked. “You may be misunderstood.”

Heydrich laughed loudly. “Oh, Dorf. Sometimes
you act as though you’re still a law student. Make sure Eichmann is present tomorrow.
He
won’t misunderstand me.”

I nodded, trying to digest all of this. “Maybe some form of quarantine, of containment, would be a good way to start.”

Heydrich sat down, threw his long legs up on the desk, crossed his booted legs and leveled one of his elegant fingers at me. “Tell me, Dorf, do the Jews serve a purpose?”

“Purpose?”

“How much of what we do to them is out of conviction, and how much is opportunism?”

“I’m not certain. Conviction, yes. The Führer, Himmler, yourself—you’ve made no secret of your views.”

“But to go to all this trouble to … eliminate them?”

He paused on the word “eliminate.” All of us are learning quickly to use code words, to dance around some ultimate truth. I wonder why? If what we plan are moral acts (as Keitel has put it), if Christianity has condoned the hatred of Jews for centuries, why are we so reluctant to brag about our true plans? After all, we are fighting a plague, a world enemy, a conspiracy. Or so Hitler contends.

Heydrich went on. An excellent speaker, extremely articulate, he now expanded on his thesis. Anti-Semitism not only binds the German people together, it will serve as a cement to hold all of Europe in one piece under our rule, he says. Most European countries abound with anti-Jewish movements, who will cheer us on. The Croix-de-Feu in France, the Arrow Cross in Romania, various native Fascist parties in Hungary, Slovakia, Croatia. Places like the Ukraine and the Baltic states, under the Bolshevik heel, will be swarming with pro-German sentiments, and these sentiments will be all the stronger if we show them our feelings about the Jews who have been oppressing them.

He winked. “A great deal of what we peddle to them will be lies, Dorf, but useful ones. Once we rouse
their anti-Semitic passions to help us resolve the Jewish problem, they’ll be next in line.”

Heydrich went on. The groundwork is already laid for us—two thousand years of Christian doctrine, supported by eminent Church fathers and doctors, proving the Chosen People to be Christ-killers, deicides, well-poisoners, the devil’s spawn, the spillers of the blood of Christian children for their Passover feasts. An endless list of old ideologies, much of it nonsense, but extremely useful.

We then discussed more immediate problems. The random killings and burnings will have to cease. The SS will be in charge of a vast eastward movement of Jews. Only Bolsheviks, criminals, resisters and potential leaders—rabbis, professionals and so on—will be executed. The mass of Jews will be quarantined in Polish cities like Lublin and Warsaw. In effect, he said, “the germ carriers will be isolated.”

I suggested we call these areas “Autonomous Jewish Territories,” and Heydrich approved the term, complimenting me.

“It will sound as if they’re permanent communities,” I said, “But of course, as you say, they’ll merely be a stage toward …”

He laughed again. “Regulation of the Jewish problem! By God, Dorf, I’m getting like you.”

“Sir?”

“Using language to say what I don’t mean. Remind me at tomorrow’s meeting. Emphasize the point. No one is ever to talk about annihilation or extermination.”

Berlin
November 1939

There was a lavish ball tonight at the chief’s headquarters.

We have a great deal to celebrate. Poland is finished. Russia occupies eastern Poland, and Stalin, in sheer terror, has negotiated a peace pact with us. The
French and English sit on their guns in the west, too frightened to move.

You could not tell that we are engaged in a war. I have never seen so many elegant uniforms, women more dazzling, bejeweled, healthily beautiful, in that best of all German ways.

Marta is radiant, ravishing. A few years ago, she was a dutiful housewife, content with cooking, children, wifely work. But the social demands made upon us have endowed her with a new elegance, a style that I find hard to believe. She wears high-fashion clothing with great flair, waltzes or foxtrots to perfection, can even flirt a bit.

I watched her dancing with Heydrich, and thought of the modest Marta Schaum I’d married. But I should have known she was a woman of enormous potential. The way she practically marched me off into my new career! She has, to be truthful,
made
me. From a jobless lawyer, full of self-pity, and excuses, I have become confident, influential, and engaged in extremely important work regarding Germany’s future. There’s no doubt that the war will soon end. England and France will come to their senses, Russia will be content to take over part of Poland, and we can live in peace once more, reshaping Europe.

And so, while admiring Marta in her pale-green dress—how wonderfully it set off her golden hair, piled high on her small delicate head—dancing with Reinhard Heydrich, I heard a voice behind me.

“Leave it to Heydrich to find the most beautiful woman,” the voice said.

I frowned, but did not turn. Obviously, the speaker did not know he was talking about my wife.

“Quite a beauty,” the voice persisted. “Her husband should know Heydrich was cashiered from the navy for compromising a superior’s wife.”

Angrily, I spun around. “That woman dancing with him happens to be my wife, and I’ll thank you—”

“Calm down, Erik,” the speaker said.

I was staring at a tall, weathered-looking man in a
civilian tuxedo, and when he smiled at me, I could not help laughing at the trick he’d played on me. It was Kurt Dorf, my Uncle Kurt, whom I haven’t seen in four or five years.

“What a wonderful surprise,” I cried. “I had no idea you were back in Berlin.”

He explained in his quiet voice that he was now working for the army in Poland—as a road builder and general civil engineer. He seemed impressed with me.

“My goodness,” Kurt said. “My brother Klaus’ little boy. An SS officer. A captain. And at Heydrich’s elbow, I’m told.”

“Oh, that’s an exaggeration. But why are you here?”

“The generals regard these affairs as a bonus for my meeting their timetables.”

We studied each other. He resembles my father, but is taller and tougher-looking. My father settled for a life as an impecunious baker, and failed. Kurt has always been driven, worked hard, held jobs that helped him get his degree in civil engineering. He is a bachelor, something of a loner, a man with few friends.

“I wish Papa were alive to see us meeting like this,” I said.

“I’m sure he’d be proud.” He nodded at Marta. “And Marta. She’s beautiful, Erik.”

“I love her more every day. More than love, Uncle Kurt—respect, admiration.”

“She seems to have earned the respect and admiration of your boss. He hardly looks like the Blond Beast people talk about.”

This drew me up short. Kurt should have watched his language, but he was always an outspoken, rather unsophisticated man. “Blond … ?” I asked.

“A street expression. You look shocked.”

I stared at him. Heydrich escorted Marta back to me. She bowed to him, told him what a great honor it had been. He kissed her hand. He said we would have to arrange another opera party some evening.

Marta then recognized Uncle Kurt, threw her arms
around him and kissed him. Heydrich watched.

I made the introductions. “General, my uncle, Kurt Dorf.”

Kurt said it was an honor to meet the head of the SS and that he had encountered many of his field commanders in Poland.

Heydrich studied Kurt’s strong face, the civilian tuxedo for a moment, then said, “Dorf, Kurt, engineer and road-building expert. Assigned to General von Brauchitsch. In charge of roads and termini in the occupied territories. Correct?”

“Totally. I had no idea your office was so well informed about humble road builders.”

“We’re well informed about everyone.”

Heydrich moved away. The music resumed. Marta suggested I dance with Eichmann’s wife. It would not hurt my career, she hinted.

Uncle Kurt escorted Marta to the bar. They drank champagne. What followed was a most curious conversation, a bit disturbing to her. Kurt, not especially diplomatically, said in a rather low voice that Heydrich did not at all seem to him what some people called him—the party’s “evil young god of death.”

Marta was shocked and said so. Who would dare say such a thing? Oh, the usual political enemies. Marta informed my uncle that we both worshipped Heydrich. He was the shining example of the Germany of the future—fearless, sensitive, intelligent, noble. Kurt tried to apologize; he was an engineer, not a politician, a mere road builder. That’s why he had remained outside party politics, a civilian. He changed the subject, and praised Marta for being so beautiful, for having a successful husband and a lovely family.

“It was simple,” my wife said. “We became part of the new Germany, with all our hearts and souls.”

“So you did.”

“You could sound a bit more cheerful about it,” Marta said.

“Oh, I’m part of it too. I know what a good job the regime’s done. People back at work—even though it’s mostly at wartime jobs. No strikes. A stable currency.
And once France and England ask for peace—the future is ours.”

“Then you and Erik are in agreement. The only difference is, he wears a uniform and you don’t.”

“Oh, dear Marta. How wonderfully you simplify things. Still, you may be right.”

He asked her to dance, apologizing for his age, his stiffness from hiking up and down the bad roads of Poland. She obliged. It was a marvelous evening—seeing Kurt again, Marta making such an impression on the chief. There really is nothing standing in our way.

As I have mentioned, my father and my Uncle Moses were members of one of the first Jewish councils organized in Warsaw, in December 1939.

Much has been written about them—good, bad, neutral. What could they do? They were helpless, without arms, without friends. The Poles were only too delighted to see the wrath of the Nazis descend on Jews, not realizing that the day of reckoning would come for them also—slaves to the New Order.

So my father and my uncle served the council, tried to make life a little better for the hundreds of thousands now being crammed into Warsaw. The same thing was happening in Lublin, Krakow, Vilna, and other cities in Poland. We know now what it meant—a step toward Hitler’s final solution.

Trains arrived almost daily, cattle cars packed with poor, hungry, frightened Jews. People died en route. Children smothered. The passengers wallowed in their own filth. There was no water, only the parcel of food they were allowed to bring along. And always the clubs and whips of the guards. Not only Germans, but many Poles, who joined the SS as auxiliaries.

They were lied to, these Jews, as they would be for years to come, and they believed the lies. Resettlement.
Your own community. Your own cities. Away from the Poles …

A man who lived through such a transport recalls my father and my Uncle Moses meeting such a train on a wintry day. There were frozen bodies on board. Two babies had suffocated.

They tried to make the people welcome. Lowy worked with my father, assigning people to quarters. The Jews lived eight and nine to a room. Sanitary facilities broke down. Roofs leaked. There was no fuel to heat the buildings. Each day, more beggars appeared on the street.

One woman on the train refused to give up her dead child. A rabbi had to convince her that the child had to be properly buried, returned to earth.

My father hated his work on the council, but he stayed with it. He much preferred working at the Jewish Hospital, as overcrowded, understaffed and miserable as it was. But he had gotten into a bitter argument with a German army doctor, and he had been temporarily suspended. The German physician had been treating typhus patients with a drug called uliron. It did not cure them. It killed them, under conditions of dreadful pain. My father protested, argued with the German. They threatened my father with punishment, beating, imprisonment, but he refused to back down. Temporarily, the use of uliron was suspended. (Later, far more fiendish experiments were performed on Jews; we were their guinea pigs, their laboratory animals.) But for the time being, my father was limited in the hours he could spend at the hospital, at his first love, medicine.

Returning from the train that cold day, with the new shivering arrivals from western Poland, my father told Uncle Moses he hated the business of deciding who got what house, how food should be distributed, and so on.

“People respect you, Josef,” Moses said.

“Do they?”

“Oh, yes. Just as I do. Ever since we were kids
here, hitching rides on those same trains. You were the smart brother, and I was the slow one. I remember the day you won the chemistry prize—how proud Papa was.”

My father smiled. “Yes. And that principal wouldn’t let me accept it in the auditorium, because, as he put it, I was of the Hebrew persuasion.”

“Right. And I stole it from his office. A certificate and fifty zlotys. Where did I find the nerve? It was the last brave thing I ever did.”

“God, how you remember.”

The brothers walked into the ghetto. As yet the wall had not been erected. They passed from the so-called Aryan side into the old Jewish neighborhood.

“And that run-down drugstore,” Moses went on. “That was my reward for not being as smart as you.”

My father took Moses’ arm. “I hurt you. I didn’t mean to. There was money only for me to go to the university.”

“No, no …”

“The pampered son. And how often did I call you, or write to you? I wonder. Subconsciously, was I ashamed that my family were poor Polish Jews?”

“Of course not. You were a busy man. A career, wife, children.”

My father stopped. Around them walked the hungry, beaten, eternal victims—the Jews of Eastern Europe. “I’m sorry, Moses.”

“No apologies are needed. We’re joined together again, in a kind of fraternal misery. Let’s do the best we can for these people.”

There was a reunion at the Helmses’ apartment on New Year’s Eve, 1939. Karl had not been released from Buchenwald. But Hans, Inga’s brother, was home from the Polish front. And Muller, in the uniform of an SS sergeant, was present.