Holocaust (36 page)

“God, I would have preferred not hearing from you.”

“Would you?”

“Others have been brave enough to remain alone—no letters, no family. And they’ve survived. Old Felsher doesn’t have a soul in the world. Maria Kalova’s husband was shot by the Gestapo the day they entered her city.”

“I felt you were not like other people. You needed my love, if only in a letter.”

“You mean I am weaker than other people. Yes, there’s truth to that. The poor Karl, the frail artist, who couldn’t survive without word from his wife.”

“Karl … we must put that in the past.” She touched his lips. “Remember when you used to call me your Saskia? Rembrandt’s wife? We’ll make the best of it. And we’ll be free. I know it.”

“No. They’ll get rid of us long before they surrender. There’s a story going around that a whole damned German army was captured at Stalingrad. But they’ll keep fighting to the end, and when they start really losing, they’ll blame us, and get rid of us.”

“We won’t give in! Not so long as I am here!”

“And what have you got? A third-rate artist. I’ve got a lump of clay where my heart should be. You think these camps make people better? No. The artists out there are an exception. We have a kind of … camaraderie. But most of the prisoners would kill each other for a piece of bread. I damned near did once … long ago.”

She sat at the edge of the cot, indicated that he sit next to her. Like a dutiful child, Karl obeyed.

“Remember when your father left for Poland,” Inga said. “How he kissed your mother, and told the children to be brave, and then he said she must remember her Latin—
Amor vincit omnia
. Love conquers all.”

“All the love in the world can’t get the best of their guns, and clubs and jails. And worst of all, their diabolical cunning.”

“I know what you have suffered, Karl. I know. But we are with each other again. I can help you.”

He got up from the cot, rested his head in his arms against the wall. “You should not have come. Let me make the best of what’s left to me. You and that bastard Muller …”

“I beg of you not to talk about him any more. Please, Karl. You say that these camps often bring out the worst in people. They kill for a piece of bread. You and I will be different.”

“How different were you when you—”

He was about to start the accusations about Muller again, but he stopped. Seated on the narrow cot, her back straight, her hands folded, she was as beautiful in her strong serene way as the day he had seen her in the art school, a prim, efficient secretary, Karl had battled my parents interminably over marrying her.
For the first time in his life he had shown determination, refused to bend to Mama’s will. (Anna and I had cheered him on. We told him we would back him to the hilt.)

Now he recalled how he had had to fight for her love. And how good she had been for him. They had been tireless museum-goers, never missed an art-show opening, took courses when they could afford them. They had long talked about a trip to Italy. Karl’s dearest possession was a book on Renaissance art Inga had given him on his twenty-second birthday. Perhaps all these memories flooded over him.

The sin, (if sin it was), that she had committed with Muller had to be seen as an effort to reach out to him, to give him the support of her letters, to let him know she still cared. He was beginning to understand now.

“Karl, I know we will be free someday,” she said. “You’ve suffered far more than I have. I want to share your suffering. I want to be hungry and cold and despised. We will share the bad things, just as we shared so much that was good. Do you remember the holiday we had in Vienna? When I could not get you to leave the rooms full of Rembrandts?”

He was smiling. The memories revived him and softened his feelings toward her. They had shared a great deal. They had so many times experienced that communion, that elevation of the spirit in the presence of a great work. Once, in Amsterdam, Karl told me, he and Inga had had to sit, and think, and be silent, just holding hands, in the presence of “The Night-Watch.”

“You are my husband and I love you,” she said. “Come sit with me. I will never leave you.”

Karl fell to his knees in front of her, buried his head in her lap. In the darkness, they were man and wife again.

But as Karl knew, and as Frey had feared, life in Theresienstadt was a great lie. Inga was required to live in the Christian women’s barracks. Karl remained
in his quarters, packed in, four people to each narrow bunk, several hundred in a building intended to hold forty.

One day there was a commotion in the streets.

Frey looked from the large window and saw an SS squad, with rifles at port arms, running at doubletime through the street. They were headed right for the studio.

The door burst open and the squad flew into the room. Everyone was ordered to stand against the wall. No one dared speak.

Maria recalls several of the artists looking at Felsher—as if to say, “You have given us away; those sketches have been found.”

Tables were smashed, wallboards ripped apart, easels turned over. The stockroom was searched from top to bottom, the file drawers where Frey kept paints, brushes, and other supplies were yanked out and thrown about.

One soldier went through Karl’s desk, checked every portfolio, threw all the posters to the floor. The sergeant stood in the middle of the floor, smacking a machine pistol against his side, shouting, “Find them, find them, goddammit.”

What the SS could not know was that all the incriminating drawings had been removed the previous day. They were safe, protected. Still in the camp, but hidden elsewhere.

Theresienstadt
April 1943

Eichmann, to my surprise, was rather casual about the affair of the “horror propaganda” pictures. I know why though. He is in Kaltenbrunner’s good graces because of his transport system—Auschwitz is going full blast—and if any blame devolves from the
matter of the secret paintings, the ax will fall on me. There are no secrets from Eichmann; he knows I have been given the prime responsibility for finding the guilty artists and the remaining works of art.

Rahm, the Theresienstadt commandant, was present, as we looked at the sketches I had brought from Berlin.

“Do you have any idea who did these?” Eichmann asked him.

“It could have been any one of a dozen. We pamper those bastards, give them privileges—and look how they repay us. I’d like to hang the whole bunch.”

“Calm down, Major,” Eichmann said.

He then studied the drawings with a connoisseur’s eye. Eichmann has that wonderful cool quality. In the midst of consigning thousands to die, he can still appreciate a landscape, a fine bit of ceramic.

Rahm and I wondered why Berlin was in such an angry sweat over five paintings. And Eichmann seemed rather indifferent himself. “Actually these are not bad,” he said. “A kind of Georg Grosz decadence, but whoever did them has talent.”

“Berlin demands the identity of every artist involved,” I said. “And they want every such secret work—painting, drawing, whatever. And also the conspirators who smuggled them out. We can’t let the outside world see these. Theresienstadt cannot be defamed by these disgusting pictures.”

Rahm shook his bull-like head. “Such a fuss over some lousy paintings.”

“The Jews have to be kept quiet, believing,” I explained. “We must proceed with the final solution in a swift and orderly manner. There have been some minor rebellions in the eastern camps.”

Eichmann rapped the desk with his crop. “Bring them in,” he said.

Rahm left us.

Eichmann winked at me. “It sounds as if you’re under a bit of pressure, Major.”

“Pressure?”

“How well do you know your Old Testament? ‘Now
there rose up a new King over Egypt who knew not Joseph.’ Kaltenbrunner’s our new king, eh, Dorf?”

I knew what he meant, but I said nothing. My career had been a direct rise so long as Heydrich lived. And now …

“But you are right about no impediments to the resettlement plan,” Eichmann said. “Have you any idea the pressures I’m under? We’re liquidating the last of the Polish ghettoes. Warsaw is the only tough nut remaining. All the Jews remaining in Vienna, Luxembourg, Prague and Macedonia are going directly to Treblinka to meet their Jewish God. We are giving the Führer his Jew-free Europe, Dorf.”

“More credit to you, Eichmann.”

Rahm and an SS corporal returned with three prisoners. They were unremarkable-looking men. Unlike the inmates of other camps who wear the striped suits, these men were in civilian dress—work shirts and trousers (marked front and back, of course, with the yellow star)—and seemed a bit healthier than the usual prisoner. They were all artists and were all under suspicion.

Eichmann introduced himself, told them who I was. His manner was polite but authoritative. “In turn, please, your names, home cities and any other pertinent data.”

“Otto Felsher, Karlsruhe,” said the smallest and oldest of the trio.

“Emil Frey, Prague.”

“That big bastard is the ringleader,” Rahm said. “Give me an hour with him and we’ll find out.” “Karl Weiss, Berlin.”

He was tall and thin, stooped, with a sad yet handsome face. A dark pensive man.

“Good.” Eichmann said. “Now please, each of you come forward and tell me which of you is responsible for these horror pictures.”

Rahm jabbed Frey in the back. “Move!”

The three men walked to the large desk. (The office is quite ornate, beautifully furnished; the furniture
carne from some of the best Jewish homes in Prague.)

I arranged the drawings on the desk—“Waiting for the End,” “The Master Race,” “Ghetto Children,” the others.

“Well?” asked Eichmann.

To my amazement, Frey, the big man who was alleged to be the leader, pointed to two pictures. “These are mine,” he said.

Felsher indicated one. “Mine.”

Weiss touched the last two. “I did these.”

“Splendid,” Eichmann said. “Now we are getting somewhere. Sit down, all of you.”

The men did so. Eichmann offered them cigarettes, smiled at them. They were obviously frightened to death—they knew what went on in the Kleine Festung—and seemed more than willing to co-operate.

“Now to the heart of the matter,” Eichmann said. “Major Dorf has come from Berlin to find out how many more of these atrocious pictures exist, where they are hidden, and who are your contacts on the outside who are helping you smuggle them out. Surely there are more than these five, and surely your intention is to flood the world with them and tell lies about us. Frey?”

“There are no other pictures.”

“Weiss?”

This man, who looked vaguely familiar to me, lowered his head. “There are none. These were the only such drawings we made.” I saw at once he was terrified; the answers would come from him.

“Felsher?” Eichmann asked.

“They … they …”

“Please go on,” I said. “Tell us.”

“They … are the only pictures done in that manner. The commandant knows our work. Posters, portraits.”

Rahm cracked the back of his hand against Felsher’s face. “You lying, sneaky kike. Talk.”

“No … no … others.”

Eichmann motioned to Rahm not to hit him again, and like a schoolteacher, paced in front of the three. He stopped in front of Weiss and asked, “You—what is the function of art?”

Oh, how he enjoyed the role—man of culture, critic, collector.

“The function of art?” asked Weiss. “Berenson said the function of art was to enhance life.”

A glow suffused Eichmann’s face. “Superb! Marvelous! To enhance life!” He indicated the drawings. “You call these life-enhancing? This garbage, this filth? How could you distort reality like this and dare to call it art?”

“It is the truth,” Weiss said. He said it in a soft, persuasive voice—and I had a sudden recollection of the Jewish physician I had known years ago. But Weiss is a common name; there were thousands in Berlin.

“Then tell me why the Red Cross has inspected this camp a dozen times and never found such conditions.”

“They were deceived,” Weiss said.

Rahm now smashed
him
across the face. A thin stream of blood trickled from the man’s nose.

I got up. “Weiss, be reasonable. I am a Berliner, like you. And we Berliners are practical people. You won’t be punished. You people have privileges here. Just tell us who your contacts are on the outside. How you intend to get this stuff out.”

“We have no contacts.”

“Then tell us where the other pictures are hidden.”

“There are none.”

Rahm was muttering to Eichmann. “Give me an hour with these lying bastards and we’ll know. With all due respect, Colonel, they don’t appreciate your art lectures.”

“Weiss? You two?” I asked. “Care to change your mind?”

They said nothing. Frey, the big man, looked firmly at the other two.

I tried a new tack. “Weiss, the commandant tells
me you have a lovely Aryan wife, who arrived here recently.”

He straightened up, turned white.

“I am sure she would want you to tell the truth,” I said.

“I am telling the truth.”

“Felsher?” I asked. Here surely was the weak link.

“I … I …”

To my amazement, my fellow Berliner, Weiss, grabbed his arm. “There’s nothing to tell.”

“Let him answer!” Rahm shouted.

“No … nothing,” Felsher said.

Whispering, I suggested to Eichmann that I talk to Weiss. Many Jews, despite their attempts at bravery, can often be argued into agreement, submission, merely by
talk
—perhaps part of their heritage of Talmudical discussion.

I took Weiss to the corner of the room. “Is it possible we’ve met?” I asked.

“I doubt it.”

“Listen, Weiss. Forget about those Austrians and Czechs. This is Berliner to Berliner.”

“Berliners have kept me in prison four years. Berliners sent my parents to Warsaw.”

“Well, maybe something can be done to make amends. Tell us where the paintings are. Perhaps I can work something out.”

“Freedom?”

“I can look into it. Otherwise, you’ll be turned over to Rahm’s people. Your wife won’t want to look at you when they are finished with you.”