Holocaust (27 page)

“A courier named Kovel. With important information for us.”

“Ah. A high-level conference.” He kissed my mother and followed Eva Lubin into the next room.

Kovel was a starved-looking bearded man with haunted eyes. But he had a precise manner, and as he sat, hunched over, rubbing his eyes and sipping hot tea, he told the group his story.

“Don’t believe anything the Germans tell you about work camps or special ghettoes,” Kovel said.

“Oh, of course we take whatever they tell us with a grain of salt.” It was Dr. Kohn, the eternal conciliator, who spoke.

Kovel looked up. His shadowed eyes took in all in the crowded cold room. “They mean to murder every Jew in Europe.”

“Impossible,” said Kohn.

“You must mean reprisals on a large scale,” my father said. Sensible man that he was, even he could not believe the truth.

“Not reprisals,” Kovel said. “Annihilation. It is their intention to kill every Jew. Why can none of you understand what I am saying?”

Eva recalls the silence. Zalman, Anelevitz and she—working people, humble people—seemed to have a better grasp of events than the educated, the professionals.
Anelevitz had been trying to tell them of their fate for some months.

Kovel went on. “There were once eighty thousand Jews in the Vilna ghetto. There are today less than twenty thousand.”

My Uncle Moses was the first to react. “Sixty thousand … ?”

“Shot by the SS.”

Dr. Kohn threw his hands up. “Utter nonsense. No one, not even the Germans, can march sixty thousand people out and shoot them. The logistics, the arrangements … impossible …”

“I’m not sure I can believe it either,” my father said.

Anelevitz sat down next to the man from Vilna and asked, “How was it done, Kovel?”

“First the SS rounded up all Jews for work and forced them to dig ditches about twenty miles from the city. Then the Lithuanian police threw a cordon around the ghetto. No one could get out or get in. If you tried to fight back, you were shot. They forced everyone out with clubs and whips. They have a technique. The Jews are forced to undress, wait, are marched into the ditches in groups and shot, either with single shots in the neck, or massed fire from machine guns. There are no exceptions. When there are delays, the Jewish Council is forced to draw up lists. Then they are shot themselves.”

Dr. Kohn wet his lips. “Ah … Vilna … perhaps an exception, a special case, you know …”

“No,” Kovel said. “Ghetto after ghetto is being wiped out. Riga. Kovno. Lodz.”

My father shook his head. “I know they are cruel and they hate us. But the German army … the old sense of honor … they must object.”

Kovel laughed bitterly. “Object? They look the other way, or they help the bloody SS.”

More silence.

Kovel told of more massacres—Dvinsk, Rowno, ghettoes the length and breadth of Poland and Russia.

“Open your eyes,” he said. “Warsaw has the biggest
concentration of Jews in Europe. Your time will come.”

“We are close to half a million,” Dr. Kohn said. “They won’t be able to dig enough ditches, find enough ammunition.”

Uncle Moses interrupted him. “They’ll find a way.”

Anelevitz looked at Kovel. “Tell us what we must do.”

Kovel took a rumpled sheet from his jacket. “Start with this. Send it out as a warning to everyone here. Read it for all to hear.”

Eva Lubin took it, and in her girlish voice read the Vilna proclamation. “‘Let us not go to our deaths like lambs to the slaughter. Young Jews, I appeal to you, do not believe those who wish to do you harm. It is Hitler’s plan to annihilate the Jews. We are the first. It is true we are weak and alone, but the only answer worth giving to the enemy is resistance. Brothers, rather die fighting than to live by the grace of the slaughterer. Let us defend ourselves to the death. Vilna, in the ghetto, January 1, 1942.’”

No one spoke for a while. Then Dr. Kohn asked, “But what good can it do? You say they’ll be killed anyway.”

“They?” Uncle Moses asked.
“We
, Kohn,
we.”

“Bare hands against tanks and artillery?” Kohn asked.

Kovel turned to Anelevitz. “Do you have any guns?”

“None yet. But we’re teaching the Zionist youth to obey orders, to work with broomsticks pretending they’re guns, to organize on military lines.”

“We’ll be soldiers first, then get guns,” Eva said.

“That sounds like Jews,” Uncle Moses said. “Not a gun among us, but soldiers.”

Dr. Kohn was shaking his head. “The Germans can be bribed. I know it. The Warsaw ghetto is valuable to them. They know the war is finished. The Americans are in the war. They’re losing Africa. The Russians will hold Moscow—”

“And we will all be dead while all that is happening,” Kovel said.

“They need our factories, our workrooms,” Kohn
went on. “Uniforms, leather goods. We Jews are skilled craftsmen.”

Kovel got up. “I cannot seem to make you understand that the murder of Jews is central to their plan. They care less about losing territory here and there, an invasion, a two-front war, than they do about killing Jews. That is their primary aim.”

“Oh, rubbish,” Kohn said. “Even Hitler is not that insane.”

The argument went on for a while. Kohn was outvoted. My father and my uncle took their stand with the resistance.

My mother had been eavesdropping from the small adjoining room. At the conclusion of the discussion, she entered, ladylike and elegant in her old robe, apologizing for her undone hair, and gave my father the money that had been sewn into her coat.

“Ah,” my father said. “For the children …”

“No, Josef. To buy guns.”

In January, 1942, Muller finally lived up to his word. He had Karl transferred to the artist’s studio at Buchenwald, a favored place to work, since it was indoors, warm, and the artists were a rather privileged group.

What kept them privileged was the vanity of the SS who enjoyed having their portraits painted, and even more, having their alleged family trees—intricate genealogical diagrams—created in glowing colors.

In the studio Karl had made the friendship of a small frail artist from Karlsruhe named Otto Felsher. Felsher had been a successful portraitist on the outside, and hence was something of a favorite of the guards, although he, like Karl, had been beaten and starved before they decided to make use of his skills.

The truth was, although they were now better treated, Karl and Felsher detested the work assigned to them.

“And how is the Muller family tree coming, Weiss?” Felsher would ask.

“Lies on top of lies. What whores they make of us.”

“It’s how we survive.”

Karl looked at the intricate, multi-colored family tree he was designing for Muller. “The bastard has me painting in Charlemagne and Frederick the Great.”

Felsher laughed. “They’re jealous because we go back to Abraham.”

“So we do. For all the good it seems to have done us.”

Sergeant Muller came by daily to look at the work in progress. “Beautiful, Weiss, beautiful. Don’t forget the two Crusaders.”

“Here they are,” my brother said.

Muller beamed. “Weiss, you and I may get to be friends when this is over. Who knows? With America in the war, I may need a Jew to say nice things about me.”

“Don’t count on me, Muller.”

The SS man took a letter from inside his tunic. “After all I’ve done for you? Your wife was here yesterday. The monthly letter from the fair Inga.”

“I don’t want it.”

“Of course you do, Weiss.”

“You made her pay the usual price, didn’t you?”

Muller shrugged. “It came postage due. She had to pay, yes. She can afford it.”

“Get away from me. I don’t want to hear from her again. Tell her—no more letters, none from her, or from me.”

Muller shoved the letter at him, jamming it into the pocket of his striped prison suit. “She won’t be coming here any more, so it doesn’t matter. You’re being transferred. You and Felsher. We’ve had a request for a couple of high-class artists.”

“Transferred?”

“Oh, you have reputations. The Buchenwald studio is famous. They want you, and some others of our skilled workers, at a new camp in Czechoslovakia. Theresienstadt. The Paradise Ghetto. Reserved for the most deserving Jews. A vacation resort.”

Muller winked, sighed, as if an old friendship were ending. “I shall miss playing mailman for you, Weiss.
But I think I will have to arrange more frequent leaves to Berlin.”

Karl had grown tough, stringy, in the camps, even on the dreadful diet, the appalling conditions. A certain recklessness—absent in him as a youth—had crept into his character.

As Muller walked away, my brother started after him.

“Don’t, Weiss,” Felsher said. “It isn’t worth it.” “The bastard. He used my wife, the way a man uses a saw, or a paint brush …” “To hell with him.”

Karl crumpled the letter and threw it to the floor. He sat, silent, at his drafting table, staring at the fake family tree. Felsher retrieved the letter from the floor and gave it to him.

“Listen, kid,” the older man said. “Nothing’s the way it should be any more. Go on, read it. Be tolerant.”

Karl nodded. There were tears in his eyes. He opened the letter (for which Inga had paid Muller’s usual price) and read it.

Karl gently folded the letter and put it back in his shirt.

He and Felsher said nothing for a while. Then the older man said, “I have heard of this Theresienstadt, Weiss. It’s supposed to be a model camp, a real city for Jews. Maybe we’re lucky. Maybe they’ll even let your wife come to see you. Me, I have no family, so one place is the same as another.”

Karl glared at the genealogical chart he had been painting for Muller with its Charlemagne and Crusaders. He picked up a pot of red paint and hurled it at the painting. Then he bent his head to the table and began to cry.

Berlin
January 1942

A few prefatory remarks before I get into the matter of this entry, namely the Gross-Wannsee Conference of January 20.

Heydrich, some months ago, let drop some information of great importance. Some time in the summer of 1941, when our Einsatzgruppen were cleansing Russia, Reichsführer Himmler summoned a man named Rudolph Hoess, commandant of a relatively obscure camp in Auschwitz, Poland, to his office, and told him:
“The Führer has given the order for a final solution of the Jewish question.”

Himmler reemphasized this a month or so later, in a speech to Blobel, Ohlendorf and the others (I was not present) in which he assured them they bore no “personal responsibility for the execution of the order, that the responsibility was the Führer’s alone.”

I mention this speech, because I have had a strange feeling, call it an intuition, that if something goes amiss—God forbid, if we lose the war, or our diplomacy fails to split the Allies and they fight on and these camps are discovered, if bodies are dug up—certain rewriters of history will seek to place the blame on
us
. By us, I mean the determined, devoted men of the SS, the Himmlers and Heydrichs, and yes, the Dorfs.

The Führer will be depicted as “just another German politician,” unaware of the horrors.

Yet the curious thing is, that while cunningly never using the exact words such as “murder” or “extermination,” the Führer has made most clear in speech and writings exactly what he wants to do to the Jews. I even get the crazy feeling that the denial of the earth to the Jews is his
foremost aim
, and transcends the subjugation of the Slavs, the punishing of France, the world rule by Germany. A rather silly notion, I admit, but the emphasis placed on our work, the privileges we get, and the ease with which Himmler has his way lead me to this peculiar conclusion.

Surely Hitler is not aware of every Jew we shoot or hang; he may not even know the precise statistics on the reduction of Russian ghettoes. But he knows, he knows. He has said many times that nothing happens
without his knowledge
. Yet I am certain that in years to come, lesser figures will be painted as the chief engineers of this awesome work, and certain scholars will try to remove him from it.

Hitler’s closest aides also know what is going on. A few weeks before the invasion of Russia, last year, Goering wrote to Heydrich and assigned to him the job of “carrying out a solution of the Jewish problem as advantageous as possible.” I don’t think this meant settling them on farms and in villages. Goering
wants, a full report on “an overall plan concerning the organizational, factual and material measures necessary for the accomplishment of the desired solution of the Jewish question.”

(Another aside: For years, many influential Jews have regarded Goering as a possible mediator for them, a fellow who is “soft” on anti-Semitic measures, and will keep Himmler and the other racial intransigents from carrying out these policies. How surprised they would have been to have read his communiqués to Heydrich!)