Holocaust (18 page)

Of course she was stopped by armed sentries. She could see double strands of barbed wire, a high fence, watchtowers, and a moat surrounding the place.

Distantly on the frozen earth of the internment camp, she could see men in striped suits moving slowly, flailing at the ground with picks and shovels.

An SS private came running forward to chase her off, but she insisted on seeing sergeant Heinz Muller, an old friend. The soldier, intimidated by her manner, rang up Muller on a field telephone, warning Inga to wait outside the outer barriers of the camp.

Muller came out of the guardhouse, buckling on his uniform belt, slicking his hair back. He was smiling, his manner cordial, almost oily.

Muller dismissed the curious sentry and extended his arms in welcome. She drew away.

“So. You got my letter.”

“Yes,” Inga said.

“How have you been, dear girl? The esteemed and honorable Mrs. Weiss.”

“I’m well enough. I’m here to see Karl. You said in the letter you would arrange it.”

Muller looked into the distance, at the men laboring out of doors under the lash of a wintry wind. There was, Inga remembers, a sniff of wet snow in the air.

“Regulations have gotten stricter,” he said. “I don’t have direct jurisdiction over inmates.”

“Then why did you deceive me?”

His eyes had trouble meeting hers. “I felt as a favor to your family. Old friends, and so forth.”

“I want to see Karl.”

Muller grabbed her arm. “Are you afraid of me?”

“No. I know too much about you. And others like you. One must not show fear to you people. My brother-in-law Rudi understood that.”

“Hah! That dumb soccer player. They’ll catch him and take care of him also.”

“Take me to Karl.”

“Come. We’ll discuss it in the guardhouse. We have a visitor’s room there.”

He led her to the barracks-like building, through a side door. At once she saw it was not a “visitor’s room” at all, but his private quarters—bed, desk, chairs, photographs on the wall.

“This is your room,” she said.

“Please, please. Guests are always welcome here. Sit down.”

Inga did.

“Cigarette?” Muller asked. “Perhaps some cognac? Nothing is too good for our brave soldiers guarding the enemies of the Reich. We do as well here as they do on the front.”

“I came here for one reason. To see my husband.”

“Perhaps some coffee. Not ersatz, mind you. The real thing.”

She shook her head.

“Ah, that Helms singlemindedness.” He put a hand on her shoulder, then began stroking the back of her neck.

She endured it for a moment, before removing his hand. “How is he?”

“Not too well, I’m afraid. He got into some trouble in the barracks. Fighting, stealing food. I’m not sure. They took him off that cushy job with the tailoring shop and he’s out in the quarry now. In fact, he and a friend of his, some kike named Weinberg, were strung up for a while.”

“Oh, my God. Oh, my poor Karl.”

“Yes, it’s no party out there with pick and shovel. The guards don’t allow any goldbricking. They work until they drop sometimes. And with winter coming on …”

Inga got up, raging, but controlled herself. “You lied to me. What a friend of my father’s! You summoned me here falsely. I can’t see him. And I learn he is
being worked to death. I have heard stories of what goes on here.”

“Nonsense. You work, you get by. You don’t work, you get in trouble.”

Inga loved my brother deeply, and the thought of him suffering, that frail man out in the snowy fields hacking at rocks, beaten, under the threat of death, broke her iron will. She held her head in her hands and wept softly.

Muller sat opposite her on his bed and put a gentle hand on her knee. “Don’t cry. I’ll help you.”

She looked up, ashamed of her tears. “How? Can you appeal to let him be freed?”

“I am only a sergeant. But … I’ll take him a letter from you.”

“You will?”

“And bring his letter out, and post it to Berlin.” “I will be grateful to you.”

“For you, Inga Helms, it will be an honor.” He lifted her chin with one hand. Inga remembers to this day that for a big man, a former factory worker, he had an oddly soft hand—as if the easy life of the last few years had changed him. He also smelled of some scent, a male lotion.

Then he knelt in front of her. She recoiled.

“Don’t, please,” he said. “I am no monster. I’m doing a job, that’s all.”

“It’s more than a job, what you people do.”

“You
people. Will you condemn a whole nation fighting for its rights, its very life? Someone’s got to take care of internal enemies.”

“Good God, Muller, spare me those party-line speeches.”

“All right. We’ll put it on a personal basis. You’ve known me a long time. I’m an old friend of your father’s, your brother’s. I was at your wedding. I watched while you married that Jew from a fancy family. And me, what about me? A mechanic all my life, no education. Was I to be sneered at, snubbed because of that? Inga, I loved you more than that … that …”

“Don’t say it, Muller.”

“It is the truth. I was dying in my guts when you exchanged rings with him. You should have been my wife.”

“Please, don’t talk about it. I brought a letter with me. Take it to him for me.” She opened the rucksack, took out the letter and gave it to the SS man.

Muller eyed it as if it were poisoned, or might detonate in his hand. “Done. Risky business, Inga. But for you … your family … Heinz Muller will take the chance.”

At this point he unbuttoned his tunic and draped it on a chair. Inga got up to leave. He stood in the doorway, barring her from going. Then he forced her to the edge of the bed.

“Your man Karl,” he said. “I saw him yesterday. He looks awful. Another few days in the quarry may kill him.”

“You said he was managing.”

“Didn’t want to upset you. But I’m telling you the truth now. They die every day out there.”

“Help him, I beg you.”

Muller began to unbutton his shirt. “I have a bit more influence than I let on. If we come to some kind of agreement, I’ll get him out of the quarry and into an even softer job than the tailor’s shop. They have an artist’s studio here. He’d be perfect for it.”

“What sort of agreement?”

“I think you understand.” He took off his belt.

“You pig.”

“Another week of hacking at rocks out there in the cold and he’ll be one more dead Jew.”

He came to her, freshly shaved, reeking of cheap men’s cologne, and began to smear her face with wet, sucking lips. She fell under the weight of his body, let him raise her dress. He tried to be gentle, but his hot, trembling hands betrayed his crude passion.

In disgust, revulsion, she found a way of combatting her hatred of him and what he was forcing her to do. She stared at the barracks ceiling, listening to his grunts, his moans, accepting the clumsy thrusts,
detesting him. It was a mechanical experience, she told herself—like minor surgery, or being fitted for an orthopedic device.

Oddly, he spent himself in seconds. He gasped, whimpered, fell away. Yes, she told herself, pure mechanics, something devoid of human qualities, detached from even the lower forms of physiology.

“I love you, dammit,” Muller whispered. He was stumbling to the small bathroom. “I love you. You will come back. And you will love me.”

She did not answer him, but thought: Perhaps I will kill you first.

I have lost any sense of how long Helena and I tried to cross into some country not occupied by the Nazis. We wandered again. Her skill with languages was an invaluable aid—Czech, German and later her excellent Russian. I posed as a stupid farmhand, talking as little as possible.

One day, sometime in January 1941, after spending a night in a deserted barn, I questioned an old farmer, and he told me that there was a thinly guarded stretch of border just to the south. He said the road forked, and the right fork led to a thick woods, where one might see eastern Hungary at one end, and even a bend in the Tisza River. It was a flat wooded area, he said, and one could find the barbed-wire barrier without too much trouble.

When night came, I led Helena to the place he had described. I had developed cat’s eyes. I could see at night, almost smell my way to water, to farms, to human habitation. The human stink was a pronounced one in the wilderness.

We crawled on all fours through thickets of scrubby bushes to a four-stranded barrier. The wire cutters went to work. Within minutes Helena and I, on our backs, shoving with our feet, pressing our spines against the earth, scratched by iron barbs and thorns, passed into Hungary. We had no idea what village we were near, what our story would be.

I led. She followed. My nose sensed the odor—too
late. A man had stepped from behind a tree and was jamming the barrel of a short rifle into my belly. He was a short, fat man in a gray-green uniform, boots, peaked cap.

“Against the tree,” he said.

Helena gasped. The man spoke German, but I was certain he was not a German. A Hungarian border guard. German was in common use in frontier areas.

“Papers,” the guard said.

“We lost them,” I said.

“Put your hands over your heads,” he said. He cradled the rifle in one hand, leveled a flashlight at us with the other. “What are you doing here?”

“Please,” Helena said. “We’re trying to get to Yugoslavia. To the coast. Give us a chance.”

“We can pay,” I lied. We had not a penny between us.

“Fucking Jews,” the Hungarian said. “You fucking Jews are all alike. You think you can buy the world.”

I measured him. About thirty-five. Paunch. Small feet. He looked soft. A few good kicks, if I could take him unawares.

“Give us a break,” I said. “We don’t want to hurt anyone. In a few days we can be in Yugoslavia.”

The guard gestured with his rifle. “Move. You first, the woman behind. If you try anything smart, I’ll shoot her. To the path.”

“Where are you taking us?” asked Helena.

“Border jail. The Gestapo sends a truck around every few days to pick up Jews, Communists, other strays from Czechoslovakia.”

“Gestapo?” she asked.

“Sure. We got no argument with them. We’re happy to send back a few Jews.”

He marched us off. We must have walked about a hundred feet down a footpath. The barren tree limbs were thick on either side of us, the ground damp. There were evergreens—pine, spruce—and we must have been higher than I had calculated. In the distance I saw the outlines of a striped sentry box. Another light flashed. Someone called.

“Lajos? Are you all right?”

“Yes,” our guardian answered. “Got two more.”

I shoved Helena out of my way—so hard that her hip and leg remained bruised for a month—and leaped at the man behind her. I hit him with all my strength—arms, head, chest—and he went down with a soft blowing-out of air. I grabbed the gun and the flashlight, but not before kicking him in the chest twice, once more in the head.

The other sentry—the man at the box—began to shout. But he did not fire. Our guard started to get to his feet, and I gave it to him once more, a violent kick under the chin that knocked him out.

“Lajos? What happened?” the other called.

We heard his boots, the breaking of tree limbs.

In a rage, I leveled the rifle at Lajos’ head, pulled the bolt. I would blast the bastard’s head off. Partial payment to the Jew-haters of the world. Then I would take care of the one running toward us.

“No, no!” Helena screamed.

I did not shoot. But I grabbed her arm. The two of us raced for the barbed-wire barrier we had just crossed. We ran forever, it seemed. I dragged her, as wicked branches scratched her face and grabbed at her clothing, and roots tripped our feet.

“Run, dammit, run,” I shouted.

“Can’t … can’t …”

“You’ll run or you’ll die.”

The other sentry had apparently stopped to examine his comrade—the one whose head I’d kicked as if it were a soccer ball.

“Stupid goddam Jews!” he shouted. “You can’t get away.”

Shots pinged around us, breaking branches, whistling and whining. But he was shooting blindly. I forced Helena to bend low. The shots ceased. He had no stomach to follow us. Not after he had seen what I had done to his buddy. And knowing I was armed. Bullies and brutes have this common trait, I had learned as a kid—they hesitate when they think they will be in a fair fight, or at a disadvantage.

“No more … no more …” Helena wept. “Rudi … stop … my chest is burning …”

We rested a moment against a pine. The sweet smell of its branches reminded me of winter vacations when I was little—Mama and Papa, and the three of us, Karl, Anna and me, in an Austrian hotel learning to ski, skating.

“That’s enough,” I said angrily. “We must keep running.”

“No … no … no more …” She was becoming hysterical. “We’re finished, Rudi.”

“No. They’ll have to kill us before I give up.”

I looked at the rifle. It was like a carbine, with a large clip for the bullets.

I grabbed Helena’s arm and we veered off the path again. Soon I noticed that the barbed-wire barrier seemed to have been cut in several places, as if others had tried the same route we had. We followed it, then had to do no more than step across a fallen section.

“What a joke,” I said. “I think we’re back in Czechoslovakia.”

“Does it matter, Rudi?” she cried.

“I’m not sure.” I took her arms, held her gently, kissed her forehead, tried to make her stop crying. “We’ll try again, Helena. I’m not ready to die for them yet. And you must not be either.”

Berlin
April 1941

The talk everywhere—in government circles, at least—is of the Führer’s so-called “Commissar Order” of last month. It will involve our people deeply.

I wasn’t present at the meeting, since it was largely for the benefit of some two hundred senior army officers. It is no secret that a vast invasion of Russia “from the Baltic to the Black Sea” is imminent.

Hitler made these points among others: the war with the Soviet Union will be unlike any war in the past, and cannot be conducted in “knightly fashion” (his exact words). The Bolshevist-Jewish intelligentsia must be eliminated. (A junior officer who pointed out that many of the Bolshevik hierarchy and commissars were Great Russians, Ukrainians, Armenians, and God knows what else was quickly silenced.)