Holocaust (16 page)

“Fooled?”

“I know you’re a lawyer, like me. The party hates us. The Führer would like to shoot every lawyer in Germany. They remind him of Jews. What saves me is I bailed the big wheels out of jail in the twenties, when you were just a fart in the wind.”

“I know about your early legal work for the party.”

“And I know how you kiss ass with Heydrich. All I can say is, he’s hiring a better class of clerks.”

My face turned scarlet, hot, as the blood rose up my neck, ears, cheeks. But I found, to my satisfaction, that I do not fear Hans Frank. He is saddled with a huge job, but he is an outsider. I have learned from Heydrich that force is the ultimate truth. If you can hold a threat over a man, imply you have support from higher authority, suggest to a man, no matter how high-ranking, that not only do you not fear him, but you may possess the power to ruin him, you will in the long run get the best of him.

I certainly do not intend to be a mirror of Heydrich. He is a general, a true leader, and in a sense, Frank was right in mocking me as a “clerk.” But I saw the self-pity in Frank’s eyes, the weakness in his mouth.
Indeed, he made me think of myself, five years earlier, before the party and the SS stiffened my spine, taught me the usages of power.

I lay my briefcase on his desk, and we stared at each other in the enormous office, hung with red, white and black party banners, giant portraits of the Führer.

I could have baited him further, but I did not. The truth is that the inner circles of the party do not fully trust Hans Frank. He is always spouting off about the need for law, for legal procedures. I recalled too well Heydrich’s admonition to me to forget the concepts I’d learned in law school. At the same time, Frank is without equal in ambition, bloodthirstiness, lack of principle, cunning. He is a bad mixture. The SS knows it and intends to bend him to its will.

“I’m sick of Jews being dumped on me,” he complained, as I started reading from Heydrich’s memoranda. “You shove the lousy disease-carrying kikes into Poland, and what am I supposed to do with them? Christ, we were better off when the SS was shooting them on sight during the invasion last year.”

“Undesirables can still be eliminated. Communists. Criminals. Troublemakers. For the time being Jews who are productive, especially in the manufacture of army goods, can be left alone. And for God’s sake, let them administer their own ghettoes. Our SS men should be used only to enforce discipline, to keep records, to get the job done.”

Frank’s erratic character makes it hard for me to conduct a coherent conversation with him. He may have been a lawyer, but his mind is a jumble. He began to rant about our “Autonomous Jewish Territories”—Warsaw, Lublin, Lodz. Sewers, he called them, stink-holes that would have to be destroyed.

Just as abruptly, he led me to the window and showed me the giant wall the Jews are being forced to build around the Warsaw ghetto. It will ruin Warsaw’s economy, he whined. The Jews hold key jobs outside the ghetto. Now they’ll be locked in. How could he keep the factories going outside? I replied that the wall, that mass of brick, rubble, concrete
and stones, is being built on Himmler’s direct order.

When he was about to explode again, I said firmly that the isolation of Jews is more important than the economy. He will have to find ways of keeping factories and businesses operating, if necessary,
without
Jews. He paced his huge office, his heels clacking on the polished floor. He lives well, envisioning himself a Teutonic knight, a medieval baron served by armies of Polish slaves.

After letting him rant a few minutes, I repeated the order: Wall in the ghetto.

At this point he leveled a finger at me, called me an errand boy and shouted that he knew damned well what the wall meant.

“Enlighten me, Herr Frank.”

“You know fucking well what I mean, and what you mean, and what everyone from Hitler down means. The Jews are going to have to disappear.”

I suggested he inform me precisely what he meant.

His face was an inch from mine. His breath was foul. His eyes were blazing. “Disappear. What the hell does a Jew-free Europe mean, Dorf? Where are we sending them? To the moon?”

This time I did not bait him. He was closer to an ultimate truth than I care to admit to myself, or at least to articulate—even to the vassal king of Poland.

“Maybe I have a stronger stomach than you,” Frank bellowed. “Maybe I don’t pussyfoot the way Heydrich does. But I told my men not long ago, it might be a problem to shoot or poison the three and a half million Jews in Poland, but we’ll sooner or later take measures that will lead to their annihilation.”

“I know you did. It was against orders.”

“Orders, shit.”

But he had given me a start. We use code words so often, walk around ultimate solutions, suggest things to one another without spelling them out, that Hans Frank’s blunt words staggered me. To fortify myself, I fell back on something Eichmann has taught me—if in doubt,
obey
. Mass murder is not a pleasant prospect.
But what if it is not truly murder, but a protective measure, a prophylactic against contamination? I kept these rationalizing thoughts to myself. Such subtleties would be lost on a Hans Frank.

He was complaining now—collapsed in his great carved throne of a chair—that he’d be forced to do our dirty work, and he didn’t like the idea. When the time came, he said, he’d “rub our noses in it.”

I could not resist taunting him about his bloody boasting—and his curious insistence on “justice, legal methods.” Like a patient schoolteacher, I quoted Heydrich to him. Old notions of justice are finished in the Third Reich. We, the police arm, decide what is just, what is unjust.

“The face is the face of Dorf, but the voice is the voice of Heydrich,” he said.

I let him think I took this as a compliment. We drank cognac, and he tried to be conciliatory. I’d thrown some fear into him. He was to keep his mouth shut about “annihilations,” wall in the ghetto, get the Jews to do the work, the registering of their own people, and work out arrangements to accept hundreds of thousands more Jews.

He grunted his agreement, and invited me to ride around the ghetto in his staff car.

The Warsaw ghetto is a depressing, filthy place, evidence that the Jews are incapable of keeping their own house in order. The streets are rubble-strewn, littered with garbage. To my astonishment, I even saw two corpses, lying in the gutter, unattended. Beggars, or homeless wanderers, Frank explained. Perhaps the feebleminded. The Jews, allegedly famous for their close family ties, their charitable interest in their own poor, are falling apart as a community, he said disgustedly.

And yet, I am forced to admit that a curious vitality survives in the gloomy surroundings. Peddlers hawk wares from pushcarts. Draymen drive wagons through the cobbled streets. Old men enter synagogues, deep in conversation, their hands waving. Women push baby carriages. Stores, while dingy and ill-stocked,
seem to be doing business. Against my better judgment, I have to conclude there is a life force in these people. Perhaps it is why they are so dangerous.

“The damned fools go on as if nothing’s happening,” Frank sneered. “They’ll learn.”

Then a curious incident occurred.

As the staff car turned a corner, impeded for a moment by a wagonload of lumber, I saw a tallish man in a dark suit and a battered black Homburg cross the street in front of us. He carried what looked like a physician’s satchel.

For a moment I thought it was Dr. Weiss, the man who had treated my family, and later taken care of Marta. I last saw him but two years ago, when he came to plead for his son.

The man did not notice me. He was accompanied by another man, more humbly clothed, and they were conversing animatedly. They entered a building with a sign on it reading
Judenrat
—the Jewish Council of Warsaw—and I lost sight of them.

An amazing coincidence—if the man actually was Dr. Weiss. Of course, I have no business with him any more. He means nothing to me. He is part of the past. A rather decent man, as I recall, but a naive one, with a stubborn wife who refused to get out of Germany when she could have.

I asked Frank if he knew the man with the satchel.

He shrugged. “I don’t keep track of every kike in Warsaw. He looks like one of the council members in that fancy hat. Damned lazy bunch. They’d better get organized, or we’ll have a few shootings to move them along. Dorf, I’ve shot more than my share of council members in the small towns, when they drag their heels. That’s what this whole thing is about, isn’t it? No old concepts of justice. Just the noose and the gun, right?”

I didn’t answer. For a while I could not shake the image of the tall man. Probably it was not Dr. Weiss. And if it was, what does that matter to me? He does not seem to be suffering unduly.

A handful of Jews survived the horror of Warsaw. Some live here in Israel, and in fact, a woman who lives near Kibbutz Agam, Eva Lubin, knew my father and my Uncle Moses. She was a resistance fighter, participated in meetings of the council, before it lost all credibility with the Jews and was replaced by the fighting units. Eva told me a great deal of what happened.

A man named Dr. Menahem Kohn was the council leader. He was, according to Eva, a conciliator, a man who would do precisely what the Nazis told him.

My father, after his defiant argument with the German doctor over the use of toxic drugs to treat typhus—remedies that killed the ill in awful pain—had something of the reputation of a resister. Nothing, at that time, could have been farther from the truth. He remained a cautious man, interested in maintaining some level of medical service, despite terrible crowding, lack of sanitation, shortages of food, heat and medicines. People succumbed daily in the hospital and around it. He and his brother Moses and the nurses watched helplessly. The children were the worst—dozens of them crammed onto lice-ridden wards, huddled, fearful, their eyes growing large, their bodies gaunt, forever crying for food.

That particular day, Eva remembers, there was a great deal of discussion about smuggling, which Dr. Kohn and most of the other elders regarded as a high crime.

A man named Zalman, a plain workman, representing the Jewish trade unions, had begun the discussion by commenting about the wall. “Eleven miles of it,” he said. “To keep us in, and the Poles out. It’s a prison, that’s all.”

My father agreed. “Warsaw will be the supreme ghetto of all time, I am afraid. It will get worse.”

There was some argument about the work on the wall, Kohn insisting that Zalman’s workers deliver more labor, more manpower.

Zalman tugged at his cap. “Not so easy, doctor. A lot of them know once that wall goes up, we’re locked in. No trade, no jobs outside.”

Kohn leveled a finger at him. “My friend, in Reszow, a Jewish council exactly like this one failed to deliver the workers quota of men. The council members were hanged publicly. We must cooperate with the Germans. We have no choice. We are what we have always been—victims.”

“I can’t tell that to my union brothers,” Zalman said.

“You had better,” Dr. Kohn said.

My father and my uncle were silent for a while. A ponderous gloom descended over the meeting of the Judenrat.

“We must stop moaning and groaning about this ghetto concept,” Dr. Kohn continued. “At least it is something we understand, something we have lived with for centuries. We will be allowed our schools, our hospitals, our communal associations. The SS commandant himself has promised me. You see, gentlemen, they
need
us—skilled labor, trade, the Polish economy.”

Again silence.

Then my father asked, “For how long will they need us?”

“I beg your pardon, Dr. Weiss?”

“Dr. Kohn, I ask how long will they need us? How long will several million poor Jews mean anything to them? In the long run we may prove a burden. Then …”

Dr. Kohn shook his head. “We have no choice but to cooperate in every way possible. Provide work details. Clean up the city. Keep the factories running.”

Moses interrupted. “I hear these work details are not quite what they sound like. Men are beaten to death, shot, for mild infractions.”

Zalman nodded. “It’s true. I’ve been on some of them. We aren’t treated like workmen, but like slaves.”

“But we have absolutely no choice but to obey orders,”
Dr. Kohn said solemnly. “We cannot resist. We must not resist. There will be no smuggling, no black-market operations, no attempts at sabotage. We can only pray for things to get better.”

Eva Lubin, who was at the meeting, remembers my Uncle Moses whispering to my father, “From his mouth and to God’s ears.”

In October, three months after Anna was sent to the mental hospital at Hadamar, my mother received a form letter from the hospital. It was brief, and it was signed by a “Director of Services.”

A strange letter. It was headed “Charitable Foundation for Mental Care, Hadamar, Germany.”

It stated that Anna Weiss, aged eighteen, had died of “pneumonia and complications.” No date was given. They had taken the liberty of cremating her body to prevent the spread of infection. At some later date, Mrs. Weiss would be informed of the location of her daughter’s grave.

Mama became hysterical. She wept for days. She was inconsolable. Anna had been the family baby, the brightest of us, the child with the greatest love of life. It was inconceivable to my mother that she could die this way—with no loved one near her, with her mind shattered, her hopes destroyed. She had been able to bear Karl’s imprisonment—after all, he was alive. Even my vanishing had been understandable. But Anna’s death was like a knife wound in her side that would never stop bleeding.

“It is my fault,” she wept to Inga. “I asked that she be sent away.”

“No, Mama,” Inga said. “We felt it best for her … she could not live a normal life.”

The women blamed themselves. From the Helms family, next door, there were clucks of sympathy, but no more. Inga heard them muttering that Anna had brought it on herself—running into the streets on New Year’s Eve.