Pursuit (14 page)

Wolf's list went on: Julius Streicher, Jew-baiter and pornographer, publisher of the official Nazi newspaper, May 23; Joachim von Ribbentrop, Foreign Minister for the Third Reich, June 4; Baldur von Schirach, head of the Hitler Youth, June 5 …

The interrogation waiting room was stuffy; the small fan droning listlessly in one corner seemed only to shift the hot air from one part of the small room to another. Benjamin Grossman, patiently waiting his turn, wondered how much personal history he should invent. One could never be sure how much information these investigators might have unearthed in other camps, or how thoroughly they might correlate the information they gathered. He should have considered the possibility of being questioned in depth about his background during the investigation he knew all prisoners were undergoing, but he was still not fully recovered from his illness and he wasn't thinking as clearly or as quickly as he once had. Not, he admitted to himself sourly, that he had been thinking so clearly when he undertook the identity of a Jew!

Still, there were no records; they had gone up in smoke when the train had been bombed at Celle. Besides, the others who had gone through the interrogation had assured him the investigators were not interested in the prisoners themselves; they were looking for witnesses, for facts, for statements, for hard evidence against those of the SS they intended to try for war crimes, and Benjamin Grossman knew what he was going to say in this regard.

He was very thin, finally beginning to walk a bit more erect, but still slouching slightly; and there were lines in his face that had not been there before and would never go away again. His hair was beginning to grow in again, and he was slowly getting accustomed to the strange face that stared at him curiously from the mirror each morning as he shaved. The new clothing issued by the British authorities, either from captured SS supplies or when necessary from their own QM stocks, felt stiff and uncomfortable in the summer heat, and for a moment Grossman wished he had worn his soft, ragged camp pajama uniform, or at least the blouse, but for the interview he felt it more appropriate to be better clad. And he really did appreciate the new shoes, even though they were heavy.

He heard his name called and rose slowly, shuffling into the next room, guided by a young corporal. He sat where the soldier indicated and stared wordlessly across the desk at the thin-lipped colonel who was returning his look with no expression at all on his slightly horse-like face. A small plaque on the desk identified his interviewer as a Colonel Manley-Jones. The colonel had a hairline mustache which he stroked constantly, sensuously, as he asked his questions. It almost looked like a form of masturbation, Grossman thought, and found himself wondering what happened when the mustache climaxed. The colonel looked down at a paper on his desk and looked up again.

“Benjamin Grossman?”

“Yes.” The colonel frowned and waited expectantly. Grossman finally understood. He added evenly, “Sir.”

“Yes,” the colonel said, and studied the paper, his thumbnail going back and forth rhythmically across the short hairs on his lip. “Your papers were destroyed in the bombing of a prisoner train in Celle last fall, I understand.” The colonel's cold eyes stared across the desk; he managed to make it sound as if the prisoners were somehow at fault.

“Yes, sir.”

“We are familiar with the incident.” And bored with it, his tone seemed to imply. The colonel abandoned his mustache long enough to shuffle some papers; he located the one he wanted and went back to his mustache, no longer considering Grossman but studying this new document instead. “Do you have a family?” He spoke a stilted but correct German.

“No.” Enough of “sirs.” To hell with the bastard, Grossman thought. And let us hope we won't have to start inventing relatives who died in other camps or in ghettos, because this colonel looks just prick enough to follow up and disprove anything we said. Still, if there wasn't a Grossman in every camp in Europe, he'd be very surprised.

But Colonel Manley-Jones was not at all interested in either Benjamin Grossman or his family; it was a question on his list that had to be asked, but there was nothing in his instructions that specifically said he had to pay any attention to the answers. At first he had listened to all the tragic stories these people managed to invent, but in the end it became quite boring. Before he had come to the camp, the colonel had supposed a bit of sympathy for them might have been in order, but that sympathy had long since dissipated into an almost active dislike for them. Oh, he supposed some of them had suffered a bit in the camps; but when you came right down to it, they were also a pretty scruffy, unattractive bunch. Guarding them could hardly have been a pleasure, and almost certainly was bound to have led to occasional excesses. Any memory of the camp as the colonel had first seen it, with its skeletal inmates gripping the fence wire for support and silently staring at him with anguished eyes, or the piles of corpses covered with flies outside each barrack or lying about haphazardly where they had fallen and died, had faded once the camp itself had disappeared in smoke and flame. The bulldozers that had filled in the huge burial pits and covered them over had buried the colonel's memory with the dead. Now the prisoners—for the colonel still thought of them as prisoners—were properly fed, probably better than they had ever been fed even before the war, and undoubtedly better clothed, as well. All the colonel wanted from this unprepossessing bunch was information he had been detailed to obtain for the coming war-crimes trials. And those trials were another thing—also undoubtedly an exaggeration, the colonel thought. It was true, he supposed, that there may have been a few sour apples among the accused captured Germans—after all, you can't pick and choose your personnel in wartime—but many of them had also been officers in the regular army, the Wehrmacht, dammit! You couldn't convince Colonel Manley-Jones that very many career officers in any army in the world—excepting the Russians, of course—would behave like that. He stared at Grossman, not pleased by what he saw, and got on with the distasteful job.

“Other than Bergen-Belsen, what camps were you in?”

“I was transferred here from Buchenwald—” Grossman waited to hear the colonel say there never had been a prisoner at Buchenwald named Benjamin Grossman, and then decided he was simply overtired. It was evident the colonel was asking his questions by rote.

“Was that the only other camp you were in?”

“No. I was in Maidanek.”

“Maidanek?” The colonel moved papers, bringing a new one to the top. “When you were at Maidanek, who was in charge?”

This was what Grossman had been waiting for.

“A Commandant Mittendorf,” he said evenly. “A vicious, miserable, perverted son of a bitch. When you catch the bastard—”

“The Russians have a full dossier on Mittendorf, I'm sure,” the colonel said, interrupting. “He's their problem if they catch him. I'm only interested in war criminals now in the Allied areas. For example—” He consulted his papers. “There was a Colonel von Schraeder of the SS at Maidanek, who was transferred to Buchenwald. That makes him our problem. A Colonel Helmut von Schraeder. What can you tell me about him?”

Grossman picked his words carefully. “Von Schraeder was the assistant commandant at Maidanek, yes, and he was transferred to Buchenwald after I was. But he's dead. He died at the camp there. At Buchenwald.”

“We've heard that as a rumor, but we want any further data we can get. We have a feeling,” the colonel said with what passed as humor for him, “that more SS died than there were bodies.”

“Von Schraeder died,” Grossman said with all the conviction he could marshal. “I know that for a positive fact. I should; I was the one who had to sew him into the burial sack and help cart him to the crematorium. He died of typhus in Ward Forty-six, and I watched him burn. With pleasure.” The conviction in his voice was not all acting; he had lived with the thought so long it had almost become truth to him.

“I see.” The colonel made a note, muttering under his breath. “Von Schraeder's death confirmed by prisoner Benjamin Grossman.” He looked up. “How long were you at Maidanek? You're sure you knew von Schraeder on sight?”

“I knew him! I was at Maidanek three years—”

For once the colonel was surprised. Maidanek might have been the problem of the Russians, and the question, like many of the others, may have been asked without conscious thought, but the answer still surprised him. He looked at Grossman almost with respect.

“How did you manage to survive so long? The stories we've been hearing about that camp—”

It was a question Grossman had given considerable thought to, and the answer came easily.

“I was strong when I first went into the camp,” he said quietly. “I know I don't look it now, but I was strong. I could do work. They made me a
Sonderkommando
…” He managed to look ashamed at the admission, knowing it would be expected.

The colonel's look of near respect changed instantly to one of deep disgust. They would soon be hanging officers, army officers, while these filth who cleaned out the gas chambers and fed the ovens would be pampered heroes! It was a strange world. The colonel changed the subject.

“And in Buchenwald?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“What did you do in Buchenwald?”

“I thought I mentioned it. I was an orderly in Ward Forty-six, in the typhus section.”

“And what atrocities did you witness in Buchenwald?”

“There were atrocities in all the camps,” Grossman said slowly, “but I was in Buchenwald such a short time, and most of the time I was in the typhus section. But in Maidanek, this Commandant Mittendorf—”

The colonel had had enough of this particular inmate, who in any event would be of no use to him. He interrupted brusquely.

“I think that will be all, Grossman. You can leave.”

Grossman cleared his throat nervously. “Colonel—?”

The cold eyes came up, contemptuous. “I said, that's all.”

“But, Colonel—don't you issue passes from the camp? I mean, your office?”

“Why? You don't need any pass. If you want to leave, just leave.” And good riddance, his tone seemed to add.

“I mean, passes to a different zone …”

“Why? Where do you want to go?”

“I thought the American Zone. Or the French Zone …”

Colonel Manley-Jones frowned. “Where are you from?”

“Originally, Hamburg.”

“That's in this zone, the British Zone. You don't require a pass.”

“I know, but Hamburg—” Grossman's shrug indicated there wasn't much left either of Hamburg or in Hamburg to entice a person.

The colonel's voice became accusatory.

“You said you had no family. Why would you want to go to the American Zone? Or the French Zone? You have no one there.”

“I have no one anywhere,” Grossman said in as reasonable a tone as he could muster, “but none of us can stay here forever. It's been two months since the camp was liberated, and a month since the war ended. There's nothing for me in Hamburg. I thought from the American Zone or the French Zone I might eventually be able to get permission to enter Switzerland …”

“Switzerland?” The colonel made it sound as if the suggestion was the most ridiculous thing he had ever heard. “You say you have no family anywhere, so obviously you have no one in Switzerland. So how do you expect to get permission to immigrate there? Switzerland isn't exactly waiting with open arms to be filled with”—with a diplomacy rare with him, the colonel bit back the word “trash” and substituted it with—“refugees.” He considered Grossman coldly. “Why, then, do you want to go there?”

Ben Grossman had always known this was a question that would have to be answered carefully. He realized he had not ingratiated himself with Manley-Jones, but he suspected no prisoner really could. He tried to sound as sincere as possible.

“Before the war I often visited Switzerland. I came to like it very much. There was a girl I met when I was in Lucerne, a very beautiful girl …” He tried to smile but the result was a rather ghastly grimace.

No muscle moved on the colonel's narrow equine face, but inwardly he was outraged. Those
Sonderkommando
hands that still carried the stench and blood of the dead bodies that they handled, to be thought of touching the body of a beautiful girl, undoubtedly a gentile girl, which all the Jews seemed to prefer? Grossman misunderstood the colonel's continuing silence for some form of understanding. He hurried on.

“Also, I'm an engineer, Colonel, a mechanical engineer by profession. I—I studied in Switzerland. I can easily get work there. I would never be a burden on the state.”

The colonel regarded him expressionlessly, and then shrugged.

“I can't imagine where you got the idea such passes are in my department. All passes from the British Zone to any other zone are issued through the office of the military governor. The liaison between that office and this camp is provided by Major Wilson.”

He immediately bent over his papers, his thumbnail stroking his mustache almost fiercely. It was an obvious termination of the interview. Grossman stared at the bent head a moment, then slowly came to his feet and shuffled from the room. The colonel looked up to be sure the man had left, then reached for the telephone and asked the operator to connect him with Major Wilson's office.

Switzerland, indeed! Not if Colonel Manley-Jones had anything to do with it! The Russian Zone, perhaps, but no pass to either the American or the French Zone, if he could help it. From there it would be only a step across the border, and the Yanks and the Frogs would probably close their eyes. They were too soft-hearted, that was their trouble. That
Sonderkommando!
It was a bloody wonder the Jew hadn't demanded a chauffeur-driven limousine to carry him in luxury across the bloody border!