Holocaust (32 page)

“The design of those trucks will have to be changed,” I said.

“They weren’t built for this sort of thing,” Nebe said.

Again, the van labored, nearly halted, as the driver shifted into a lower gear.

“What is it like inside?” I asked.

“Oh, a great deal of clawing and scratching goes on. Sometimes you can hear them pounding on the sides.”

I cocked an ear, listened.

“Not now. The truck motor is too loud.”

After another five minutes along the dirt road—the grade had lessened, so the driver was able to make better time along a level stretch—the van veered off into a field, then into a grove of scrub trees. A familiar stench assailed my nose: rotting bodies. Flies swarmed around us.

Nebe looked at his watch. “Not bad. A half-hour from the Chelmno camp. They should certainly all be finished.”

I was shaking my head. “It isn’t what we have in mind. We’ll be burning out truck engines all over Poland. Far too expensive, laborious.”

Nebe agreed with me. “Yes, new methods are needed. Colonel Blobel, Colonel Ohlendorf and I discuss the matter frequently.”

“Do you? What else do you discuss in these meetings?”

“Many things.”

“Do you ever compose anonymous letters to Himmler and Heydrich about some of your colleagues?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Major.”

“Don’t you?”

He did not want to finish the conversation. Instead he motioned for me to follow him to the van, where the driver and another SS man, assisted by some Polish workmen, were pulling naked bodies from the rear of the van. We covered our faces with handkerchiefs. The stench of feces and blood was overwhelming. The bodies were grotesque, stained brown and red, eyes popping, mouths twisted, as if they had died in agony.

Suddenly, I could see the sergeant yanking at a small form, pulling it away from a corpse. Then he pulled and tugged at another. These were children, perhaps six or seven years old. One of them was a male child with the odd shaved head and curling earlocks I had seen among Orthodox Jews of the East. They were alive, mumbling, crawling.

The sergeant quickly killed each one with a shot in the base of their necks.

He came up to Colonel Nebe and saluted. “All dead, sir, except for the two children. Sometimes the mothers protect them.”

We walked back to the staff car.

“Bad, bad business,” I said.

“Yes, one can be touched by it, even if they are Jews. Some of the men break down.”

I looked at Nebe with contempt. He had ordered the massacre of hundreds of thousands. Surely these were the hugest crocodile tears ever shed by anyone. Hard and cold, like my masters, I suppressed any sense of pity. It has become relatively easy for me to dismiss the humanity of those we rid the world of. One can accomplish miracles with the will.

“That isn’t what I meant,” I said. “It’s utterly inefficient and wasteful.”

At Theresienstadt, Karl had now been drawn into the circle of artists who were working secretly, at great
risk to themselves and their families, to leave a truthful record of the camp.

He joined Frey, Felsher and the other artists with vigor and all his artistic skills. He no longer heard from Inga, and he pretended not to care.

Maria Kalova, one of the artists, remembered him looking angrily as another “inspection team” toured the camp and agreed that Jews really had no cause for complaint.

“Another Red Cross inspection,” Maria said.

Karl laughed bitterly. “They have fooled the world. Or else the world doesn’t give a damn. What confounds me is that no one seems to ask what right they have to put us in prisons at all. The assumption seems to be that it’s all right for Jews to be jailed and treated like dogs, provided they aren’t murdered.”

Frey walked to the studio window. “I am not so sure we are not being murdered. And I don’t mean the deaths here from disease and hunger, the reprisal hangings.”

“What do you mean?” Karl asked.

“Systematic murder. Large groups of people. One of the Czech police told me something about trains being sent to Poland … stories about new camps.”

They returned to their drawing boards.

Karl was working on a large poster. Happy faces. People at work. It read:
WORK, OBEY, BE THANKFUL.
Suddenly he tossed his brush down, held his head in his hands.

Maria tried to comfort him. “I don’t blame you. We all feel that way sometimes.”

“Why did they take over the way they did? Doesn’t anyone ever say no to them?” He looked up. “Did I ever tell you about my kid brother, Rudi?”

“No. Just about your parents, and your little sister.” She hesitated. “And about Inga.”

“That Rudi. He ran away. Braver than any of us, or maybe a little crazy. He’s dead by now, or maybe he’s killed some of them. Four years my junior, but he used to defend me in street fights. I think about him a lot.”

“It sounds as if you had a marvelous family. I wish I knew them.”

“I’ll never see them again. And Inga, damn her. I never want to see her again.”

She touched his hand. She was a woman in her late forties, still attractive, with a warm heart. Her husband had been a leader of the Jewish community in Bratislava. He had been taken out and shot on the first day of the German occupation. (She now lives in Ramat Gan, near Tel Aviv, and is the director of an art school; we have become friends.)

“Karl, you mustn’t condemn her simply because she is a German, a Christian.”

“That’s not why. She brought me letters when I was in Buchenwald, accepted my letters. There was this SS sergeant she’d known before the war—a family friend. He was our mailman.”

“That is no crime.”

“He had a price for his services. She obliged him.”

“She did it for you, Karl. So she could hear from you, write to you. From what you tell me, that was her only reason.”

Karl sighed, leaned back. “The hell of it is, Maria, she was always stronger than I was. I wanted her to be stronger. And then … to give in to that bastard Muller …”

“You are not as weak as you think you are,” Maria Kalova said. “You are a superb artist.”

“A hack. A dauber. I was a disappointment to my parents, especially Papa. Rudi and me both. We never lived up to what they expected.”

“I am sure they loved you very much. Just as Inga still loves you.”

“She should have said no to Muller.”

“You must not hate her for it. When you see her again, and I know you will, you must tell her she is forgiven.”

Karl could not be comforted. “You heard what Frey said. We’ll all die. There will be no happy reunions.”

“You must be more hopeful.”

Karl lifted the poster he was finishing. Under it was a charcoal sketch, one of the secret drawings the artists were creating, pictorial histories of the appalling conditions in the camps, the bestial inhumanity of the Germans.

It was called “Ghetto Faces,” and it was a mass of starved, hollow-eyed children, holding out their dinner plates, begging for more food. It is a haunted, terrifying picture. I saw it at Theresienstadt when I went there after the war.

“Be careful, Weiss,” Frey said.

“Let them catch me.”

“It won’t be just you,” he said. “Several of us are involved. When you joined us, you agreed to keep that stuff hidden, work only at night.”

He stared at the faces he had drawn. Maria swears she remembers him asking, of no one in particular: “Rudi … where are you, brother?”

By July 1942, we had enough guns to begin raids against our enemy. Or rather, our enemies. Much of the Ukraine was patrolled by local militia. They wore the same uniforms as the SS, with a special insignia, and they entered energetically into the murder and torture of Jews, and anyone else the Nazis felt were threats to their rule of the Soviet Union.

On a sticky humid night, I crouched in a thicket at the side of a road leading to the nearest town, along with Uncle Sasha, Yuri and four others of our band. Our faces were blackened. Each of us had an old bolt-action rifle.

“Scared?” Sasha asked.

“Yes,” I said. “Never been more scared.”

“Don’t get caught. Remember what I told you?”

“They’ll torture me, make me tell them where you are.”

“That’s right. Kill yourself if you have to.”

I did not want to get caught; I did not want to kill myself; and for all my bragging to Helena, my insistence that I wanted to get back at them, I was terrified,
wondering if I could kill someone. There was hate in me, a great deal of it. But I found there was a lot less courage than I had imagined there would be. In those moments of waiting I felt less contemptuous of those Jews I had seen surrendering quietly, meekly following orders, standing naked, unprotesting, in the ditches.

“How long?” I asked.

Sasha put a finger to his lips. “Ssssh. I hear them.” We heard it also. Boots on the road. A man singing. Voices.

“Germans?” I asked.

“Ukrainian militia,” Sasha said.

“Do we want them?”

“We want their guns and their bullets and their boots, boy. Besides, they’ve killed Jews since the first Germans came here. You know, the bastards have a whole army—an
army
—fighting for the Nazis?”

I felt my hands tremble around the stock and trigger of my gun. So little ammunition did we have that we could not even have target practice. We pretended, shooting empty guns against paper targets. And I was painfully hungry. We ate very little in the family camp.

Six men in SS uniforms came down the road. They obviously were not in the least expectant of any danger, for they walked in close formation, one man singing, others chatting. Their rifles were slung over their shoulders. One seemed drunk and was being helped by a comrade.

“Fire!” Sasha cried.

I needed a moment to react. It did not seem fair to me. We were killing them the way they killed Jews. Too many soccer matches, handshakes, notions of sportsmanship and such schoolboy ideals, Sasha said later.

We blasted them with our rifles. Three men fell at once. One screamed and began hopping about on one foot. Another ran for cover and began firing a machine pistol at the bushes where we were hidden. The last started to run.

Yuri crawled out. He and Sasha began to circle the
man firing with the Schmeisser. Sasha screamed at me, “Get the one who’s running!”

I could see him loping down the road, back to the town. He ran clumsily, weighted down by his gun, his pack. Bullets sprayed and painted yellow streaks in the night. Luckily, the man with the machine pistol—he must have been the squad leader—was preoccupied with his attackers. He could have shot me down in an instant as I ran to the fleeing man.

I knew I would catch him. I could always run. When I was a yard behind him—he was breathing heavily, pumping—I smashed at his back with the stock of my rifle. He went down. He whimpered. I dragged him to his feet and stared at him. A kid. Maybe sixteen. He had fat pink cheeks, stupid eyes, and long hair the color of cornflowers. I dragged him back to the hedgerow. The shooting had stopped. All the other Ukrainians were dead. Yuri and the others were stripping the bodies of guns, ammunition belts, boots and anything else of use.

I disarmed my captive and shoved him toward Sasha. He fell to the ground and reached for my boots. He was sobbing in Ukrainian, but I understood not a word he said.

“Take him in the bushes and shoot him,” Sasha said.

“Shoot … ?”

“I said kill him.”

“Why? He’s a kid. Can’t we send him back?”

Sasha grabbed the rifle from me. “If you don’t, I will. That little shit has killed Jews as if they were flies. You let him live, he’ll go back to the village and bring the SS. Shoot him.”

He was right. We were in a war of annihilation. I dragged the young boy into the woods, shoved him around and muttered something about tying him up. Then I leveled the rifle at his skull and blew the back of his head off.

My hands shook. I began to cry.

Sasha paid no attention to me when I came out of the hedgerow. He was shouting orders at the raiding
party, telling them to hurry. “Enough, enough. We don’t want their underwear. Just boots, belts, guns. Let’s move off.”

We ran off the road into the woods, keeping far apart. We walked swiftly. Camp was at least two hours away.

I walked alone, through the dark woods, straggling, stumbling, keeping an eye on Yuri, who was ahead of me. Never had I killed anyone. Oh, I had bragged a great deal, told Helena over and over how much I wanted revenge. But the sight of that stupid boy’s terrorized eyes, the knowledge that he was finished, would never see a sunrise, or a girl’s face, or swim in a clear lake again—all these rattled me, made me wonder if I were the bloodthirsty avenger I’d imagined myself to be.

I knew something about myself. Killing was indecent, depraved. I would not get used to it. One killed to survive, to keep one’s loved ones alive. No good attached to ending the lives of others. That Ukrainian kid had parents, a family, hopes. Like the millions of us now dying for no reason.

I consoled myself. They were notorious murderers, paid killers, merciless in their hunting down and shooting of Jews. There should have been triumph, exaltation in my heart. But I was no warrior King David, exulting in the slaying of thousands. I was miserable, and cold, and drained. Worse, I began to wonder if there was any point to our resistance, to Sasha’s “family camp,” his hardheaded determination to evade, strike, kill. But there had to be, I decided. We were all marked for death by the Nazis, and the death Sasha had chosen was better than the one they had planned for every Jew in Europe.

Back in the camp, exhausted, I rested on the cot in the hut I shared with Helena and another couple, and stared at the sagging boards in the roof.

“He was a kid, maybe sixteen,” I said again.

“Rudi, don’t talk about it any more.”

“Yuri says he was the kind who kills Jews for pay, for a loaf of bread.”

“Please, please, Rudi … no more.”

“I never killed anyone before.”

“You had to.”

“The back of his head. It sort of floated away. Look. His blood on my tunic.”