Pursuit (15 page)

Max Brodsky and Morris Wolf were discussing God.

Time passed slowly in the camp and a discussion on any subject was a welcome relief from the boredom, becoming the principal mental exercise the inmates could indulge in. Besides, being Jews, Wolf and Brodsky were prepared to argue either side of any proposition with a passion that was almost the equivalent of honest conviction.

“How can anyone but a fool deny the existence of God?” Brodsky demanded. “Look around you. Where do trees come from? Or flowers? They say that man descended from the monkeys, but what about trees? Another question—where do
you
come from? Why do you have five fingers—”

“Ten.”

“—on each hand,” Brodsky said, determined not to be put off by Wolf's so-called humor. “It isn't something that happens occasionally; it happens every time a baby is born. Millions of times a year. Every time the same five fingers on each hand, five toes on each foot. Why do you think the sun rises in the east every morning? According to you, it's all an accident, is that it? On a Tuesday you get up expecting light and that day the sun is just going down—”

“You overslept.”

“I'm serious! Everything that happens is following some great master plan. Nothing happens by accident. Look around you.”

Brodsky was sitting on his cot, picking the threads from the SS shoulder patch on a woolen shirt he had just “organized” from the captured stores. At his elbow a radio softly gave the news. Max's thick fingers, once again approaching their former strength, held the tiny needle with infinite delicacy.

“All right, look around you!” Wolf countered, no longer humorous. “Take a good look! Go take a look at the burial mounds, go look at the electrified fence, take a look at the watchtowers and the
momsers
there with their machine guns! This is all part of your God's master plan? All those dead people? The chosen people! That's a laugh! Chosen to be killed. This is your God? The one who fried the people like that dumb Yashinko? On the fence?”

“He was shot. And he wasn't a Jew.”

“So that makes him healthy again!” Wolf shook his head disbelievingly. “On a Tuesday the sun is going down instead of up, you don't know whether to eat dinner or breakfast—that's your argument for God? I'm impressed. The gas chambers, the ovens, the pits! Those are
my
arguments. And they outvote you six million to one!”

Brodsky shook his head stubbornly, his thick fingers continuing to pick delicately at the stitching of the patch.

“You don't understand,” he said sadly. “You don't want to understand. If there's no God, what makes everything work? How do you explain the fact that every winter it gets cold and it snows, every summer it gets hot. Every year with no exceptions. Answer me that! Accidental? Never!”

“I have no idea,” Wolf admitted. “I admit I don't understand, I only know this—leaves or trees or no leaves or trees, sun or no sun, snow or no snow, why does your all-powerful God permit a Hitler to kill millions and millions of people? Does your God think we're overpopulated? What kind of a God lets things like that happen? You answer me
that!
”

Brodsky paused in his work, frowning.

“I don't know,” he said slowly, “but God has his reasons. We have to believe that …”

“You have to believe it,” Wolf said bitterly. “I don't. Look at me. I'm a gargoyle. I could get a job swinging from that Notre Dame church in Paris. They could hire me to frighten children. Children? Adults! God needed another ugly man? And if he needed one so badly, he couldn't make one from an SS? He needed me?”

“You don't understand,” Brodsky said patiently, and then paused as Grossman came into the room. He smiled and gestured toward Wolf's list on the wall. “They picked up Raeder today. The great Admiral of the Navy was simply sitting at home in the Russian sector of Berlin, can you imagine? Officially registered and completely undisturbed. It's—” He noticed the expression on Grossman's face for the first time. He reached over and switched off the radio. “What's the matter?”

Grossman slumped onto his cot. “I didn't handle it very well.” And thought, a few years ago I would have had that miserable colonel shoveling shit in the gas pens, carting the dead to the ovens, and happy to be alive to do it. Now I sat and
apologized
to the bastard! The time here at Belsen has done more to me than I would have supposed!

“Who did you have?”

“Some colonel. Manley-something.”

“Manley-Jones,” Wolf said and bobbed his small head. “I had him. He's a prick. There has to be one in every outfit, I guess, including the British. Or maybe especially the British.”

Max had stopped his needlework. “So what happened?”

Grossman shrugged. “I should have stopped after I answered his questions and he told me to go. But I thought he was the one who handed out passes to a different zone.” He stared down at his new shoes. “Now the son of a bitch is undoubtedly getting in touch with some office and making damned sure I don't go anywhere. Especially Switzerland.”

Brodsky snorted and went back to his blouse. “Switzerland, Switzerland! It's all you talk about. You'd think you had a fortune in a numbered account there!”

“If I thought so,” Wolf said, “I'd get you into Switzerland if I had to carry you across the border. And don't break our hearts about that girl you say you met there before the war,” he added. “You think she's still waiting for Grossman to appear after six years?” He put a hand up to his scarred face, moved his fingers to touch the eyepatch over his empty socket. “For somebody handsome like me, maybe they'd wait—but for you?”

“Forget Switzerland,” Brodsky said definitely. “Come to Palestine with us, instead. We've got prettier girls.” My Deborah, for instance, he added to himself, and wondered if his Deborah would still be waiting after all the years. He had written to her immediately after liberation, and still had heard no word.

Grossman shook his head. It was an old argument. “If you two want to go to Palestine, go. Nobody's stopping you.”

Wolf smiled. “Only the British.”

“That's your problem. I'm going to Switzerland, and the British aren't going to stop me. Certainly no British named Manley-Jones!”

Brodsky went back to his needlework, speaking over his shoulder.

“So at least come with us until you're somewhere near the Swiss border. You can say good-bye there just as easy as here. We'll be leaving here in a month or so—”

“A
month
or so?”

“That's right.”

“When was all this decided?”

“Today, while you were at your interview. The Mossad man was here, you knew he was coming today. Davi Ben-Levi. You didn't want to see him, remember?”

“I didn't have anything to see him about.”

“Well,” Brodsky said, disregarding Grossman's comment, “the Mossad are setting up places we can stay until we reach a port in Italy. They have to buy a ship, or ships.” He shrugged. “It all takes time.”

“And you're going to stay here until they're ready?”

“Why not?” Wolf said. “What's wrong with here? All the comforts of home—” He gestured toward the radio. “Entertainment, good food, good company—”

“Well stay here a month or possibly more,” Brodsky said. “By that time you can put on your camp uniform, the striped shirt and cap, and walk across any zone without any pass at all. You'll see. Besides,” he added quietly, “most of the men are in no condition to travel, as yet. You, for example.”

“There's nothing wrong with me. Once I get to Switzerland—”

“There's nothing wrong with you,” Wolf said, “except if you want to walk, you have to take off your shoes. They're too heavy for you.” He shrugged. “I see you now, shuffling across the border, one mile an hour, with the border guards in hot pursuit. Sitting on turtles.
That's
how fine you are.”

Grossman didn't argue. Brodsky nodded.

“We're also going to have to organize some warm clothes—”

“In July or August?”

“We'll leave here in July or August, that's true. But we won't be taking the Rome Express, first-class, with meals,” Brodsky said dryly. “Sometimes well have to walk, sometimes maybe we can hitch a ride, or the Mossad can arrange transportation, but we can't depend on it. Once we cross into Austria without proper papers we may have to hide out a lot, travel by night, hide by day. And once we cross the Italian border it will be worse. The British practically control Italy now, especially the north, and they don't intend to let any Jews leave for Palestine if they can help it. So we don't know when we'll get to a port, or when a ship will be ready.” He pointed to the shirt he had stolen from supplies. “So we'll need clothes, warm clothes.”

Grossman leaned back on his bed and thought about it. It was true he was still far from his full strength, but he was sure he was strong enough to cross a border. He didn't intend to fight his way across; he meant to use his brain. Still, it was also true that at the moment he was sure Colonel Manley-Jones would do his best to see there would be no travel pass for him to any zone adjacent to the Swiss border; but in a month or so, it was highly possible that Manley-Jones would be out of here. The interrogation process was already nearing an end, with the war-crimes trials already announced by the Russians to begin in Berlin, and the trials in Nuremberg would follow soon after. Max was probably right that in a month or so passes would be a mere formality, and anyone in a camp-striped shirt would be able to go where he wanted without any problem.

He looked up.

“From here you plan to go directly to Italy? Or try?”

“No; from here we'll be going to Munich, to an Allied refugee camp there in Felsdorf.”

“And how long will you stay there?”

Brodsky shrugged. “Until the Mossad tells us to leave.”

Grossman thought that over. It was true that there would be no harm in going as far as Felsdorf with Brodsky and the others. It was also true that it might be helpful to travel in the company of others. There was safety in numbers; some of the ex-prisoners who had left the camp and returned for a visit had said the world outside was a jungle. Gangs of discharged soldiers, ragged and hungry, often attacked anyone who looked as if he had anything worth taking. Besides, he actually was in no great hurry; since the camp's liberation and his recovery from typhus, he had gone back to considering his old plan as being fully operational. He was no longer a suspected war criminal, and he would soon be in Switzerland; and that had been the original idea, hadn't it? The time lost at Bergen-Belsen had been an unfortunate hiatus, a distressful detour, but now he was back on the track. He looked at Brodsky.

“How do you plan to get to Felsdorf?”

“Hike into Celle and get rides on trucks from there. Hitchhiking.”

“And from Felsdorf, how do you plan to go? Where do you intend to cross the Austrian border? Anywhere near Switzerland?”

Brodsky was busy folding the shirt into his knapsack. He slid the knapsack into the small locker beside his cot, locked the locker, and put away the key.

“That's up to the Mossad,” he said. “They may take us down to Lindau on the Bodensee, then through Austria to the Italian border, then down to some port on the west coast, like La Spezia or Livorno. Or from Munich they may go down through Innsbruck and then over to some port on the Adriatic, like Chioggia.”

“Ask the British where they won't have gunboats to follow us and sink us,” Wolf said dryly. “That's probably where the Mossad will take us.”

Brodsky suddenly looked at Grossman, sensing that the question meant a surrender of sorts on the part of his friend.

“You mean you'll go with us?”

“As far as Felsdorf,” Grossman said. He made it sound a concession.

Brodsky smiled inwardly. Long before Munich or Felsdorf he would have converted Benjamin Grossman to Zionism. Palestine needed people like Grossman: an engineer, a good friend. A survivor.

Switzerland, indeed!

Chapter 8

Karl Neuenrade was not only the only waiter at the Gemustert-Essen-Keller in Celle, he was also the proprietor; his wife was the cook, and his daughter sat at the cash register, her rotting teeth and straggly mustache protection against the most salacious or sex-starved customer.

Life had been good to Karl Neuenrade. Early in his restaurant career he had established excellent relations with the farmers in the Celle area, so that the rationing that had been austere during the war, and which became even more draconian following the war, did not greatly affect him or his fancy food. There was, however, one cloud on Karl Neuenrade's horizon, and it was one that grew in size each day that passed following the liberation of Bergen-Belsen. It was the fact that during the war, while his wife and daughter had run the restaurant and run it quite profitably, Karl had served as the SS sergeant in charge of the prisoner food program at the
Belsenlager
, and as such was known to many of the prisoners, especially those who had worked in the cookhouses. As soon as the camp had been liberated and turned over to the British by Joseph Kramer, the commandant, Karl Neuenrade had hurried home and removed the sign pointing down the steps to his restaurant, informing all customers that it was out being repainted. Nor did the sign go back up again in a hurry, and while its absence undoubtedly caused the loss of some customers, it was better than having the place inundated with ex-prisoners. The ploy seemed to have been successful; while every other restaurant in Celle had been forced to serve God knows how many free meals to the men in the striped blouses as they made their way through Celle on their way home, the Gemustert-Essen-Keller saw none.

June passed, and July and August, and in September, when apparently all the prisoners at Bergen-Belsen had either left the camp or had settled into the former German Army quarters for a long, long stay, Karl Neuenrade congratulated himself on his foresight as far as the sign was concerned, and mounted it once more on the wrought-iron frame that swung over the cellar steps.