The Hormone Factory (26 page)

“You wouldn’t have recognized him, Motke,” the Dauphine said with a smile. “There was nothing left of his old apathy. There was a dogged intensity I had never seen in him before, an acute restlessness that seemed to be driving him on. He would not stay for dinner, although he probably hadn’t had a good meal in quite a while—he looked pale and exhausted—but he said he had to go. He was in a fever to do what he could to save what could be saved.”

Some months later, in September 1943, Levine saw him one last time. This had been at the railway station. The last Jews still remaining in the city had been rounded up and were being packed into trains bound for the Westerbork transit camp, including Levine’s daughters and their families. The professor had run to the station in a last, desperate attempt to rescue them; a fruitless mission, for the German officer in charge would not relent. Levine was running along the platform looking for his daughters to say goodbye, and spotted Aaron in the doorway of one of the crowded railcars.

“Levine!” Aaron had shouted. “Have you come to wave us off? We’re traveling in style, just like our pigs on their way to the slaughterhouse.” He gestured at the packed cattle car at his back. Just then Levine was ordered off the platform, and the freight car doors were slammed shut. He had failed to find his daughters. The sounds of the doors screeching shut and the clang of bolts sliding home went on ringing in his ears for a very long time.

“Rafaël returned from that mission a broken man,” the Dauphine continued. “His health has been going downhill ever since. He started having heart trouble. But he never gave up trying
to stop our children or his friends and colleagues in the transit camp from being sent on to Poland. He just kept going day and night with the same single-mindedness that he’d applied to running his institute, doing as much as he could for them, largely in vain. When the children were finally sent on, we tried to console ourselves with the thought that the special stamps in their ID cards would land them in a camp in Germany, and not in Poland; that they’d be sent to what was called a ‘preferential treatment camp.’ But now we hear that in those last few months, the German camp was actually the worst of all, an inconceivable hell, with prisoners dying by the thousands from hunger, exhaustion, and typhoid. We still refuse to give up all hope, but we haven’t yet heard a word.” She sighed, staring bleakly into space.

I was silent. I was dying to ask her how far, exactly, Rafaël had taken the role of savior; what he had done with his shares, whether his hands were dirty or clean, and how they were still living scot-free in their own unscathed house, when elsewhere there were no Jews left, except for the lucky few who had come out of hiding. But asking about it now seemed inappropriate. Besides, the Dauphine was not yet finished. She jabbered on, as if putting the horrors of the past five years into words would lessen their sting.

“As for Aaron,” she continued, “we heard he was very quickly sent on to Poland.”

The gaping hole in my chest began to ache. “And the Salomons?”

“For the Salomons too, Rafaël left no stone unturned. But then they asked him to stop. They weren’t afraid of dying. ‘We’ve had our time,’ they said. They explained they’d rather Rafaël spend his money and efforts on saving the young people. They were sent on almost immediately. Old people didn’t stand a chance.”

We sat there for a while in silence, the only fitting response to the Dauphine’s harrowing tale. No, that’s wrong—the only suitable answer to her story would have been a visceral scream, an animal cry like the howl of a jackal, growing louder and louder as it passed from person to person, from nation to nation, from continent to continent, until the whole world was one great sound wave of anguish, a cacophony of cries, a pandemonium of pain, a symphony of despair, culminating in a frenzied finale of agonized screams. And then, silence.

43 …

I left the suitcase of food with the Dauphine, who thanked me profusely; she was going to use the ingredients for a rare feast. I turned down her invitation to join them for the meal, since my primary errand in Amsterdam was to have a rather painful conversation with Levine, and once he’d heard me out, I didn’t expect that he’d be very keen to have me at his table.

Getting up from a rickety desk in his ransacked laboratory to greet me, Levine appeared fragile. The august dinosaur of yore had lost much of his former imposing looks. He too had grown thin, and he seemed shrunken. The little mustache, however, with its now infamous association, had managed to survive these five years, although it was no longer jet-black, but gray. He greeted me warmly; I was more reserved.

I told him in broad strokes how we had fared, and that the Dauphine had already updated me on their bitter news. He seemed relieved to hear it.

“Good,” he said, “then we can get on with discussing how to get the business back on its feet. We have no time to waste. It seems there have been incredible new breakthroughs in the development of steroids and synthetic preparations, which I am only just now finding out about. We have quite a bit of catching
up to do! Who knows if we’ll ever be able to make up for lost time. Especially since so many of our esteemed colleagues are not likely to have survived, although I haven’t given up hope that many of them will still show up someday. If they wound up somewhere on the Russian side it could take some time for them to reach the Western sector. And as for you, Motke, I understand that you have been working diligently on expanding the firm. I applaud you for that.”

This was Levine all over. His laboratory had been verboten to him for all this time, and now he was eager to get back to work as soon as possible, all systems go and full speed ahead, to catch up and recover his preeminent position as a trailblazer in the pharmaceutical field. He looked frail, but far from defeated. For an instant I was tempted to take up again with my old partner where we had left off. The Dauphine’s sad tale had softened my stance on Levine’s wartime choices; the day’s emotional turmoil had aroused some compassion in me. I sorely wanted to give in to that sense of sympathy, but I could not ignore what my cousin and I had decided: I was here to settle an important issue. In our blueprint for the multinational we had been working on while Levine was putting all his efforts into keeping himself from deportation, there simply was no place for the former colossus. He was too old, too stubborn and set in his ways, too passé, and, worst of all, too German.

So I said, “Rafaël, before we go any further, I’d like to clear up a few things. I’m not going to beat around the bush. People say that you were the only Jew to have kept your privileged position throughout the occupation. How did you manage that? What did you have to do? Who did you have to pay, and what price?”

Levine shut his eyes. Then he smiled. “Aha,” he said, and the derision in his voice did not escape me, “do I hear a judgmental
undertone in these questions by my dear colleague, the chairman of Farmacom, who turned and ran as soon as he had the chance? Is he sorry that I managed to keep myself, my family, and a few of my friends out of the gas chambers?” he asked, tapping his pen angrily on the mangled desktop.

“I am very happy that you have survived,” I replied, “and to find you in such good health. And as far as my flight goes, I left because I had received information from my contacts in government that the brownshirts were keen to get their hands on the company, and that I was a prime target of theirs. I got out of here for the sake of our firm.”

Levine laughed scathingly. “They were keen on getting their hands on Farmacom, you are correct about that. They couldn’t get over how you managed to escape. They were furious that you outfoxed them with that diplomatic train ploy, and they were crushed to think they might be missing out on the income from our foreign patents and licenses. They were also afraid you’d cut the foreign branches off from the Dutch concern. It was that fear that caused them to treat me with kid gloves at first. Which, in turn, gave me the opportunity to help many people obtain those exorbitantly expensive, ultimately worthless deferment stamps—they fleeced us blind! I did manage to help finance a hiding place for some—including for one of your workers, in fact: the Salomons’ protégée and her child. That one cost us a pretty penny. Even over there in your luxury exile you must have heard that going into hiding often meant having to pay through the nose. If they were going to stick their necks out for a stranger, most of the Dutch weren’t all that keen on being made worse off by it; they much preferred being made richer. A mercenary lot down to their very bones they are, these compatriots of ours who are now celebrating like mad, piously
pretending they were all resisters. As if there weren’t a single enthusiastic Nazi flunky or Jew hunter among them. I can’t say they’ve left me with a very favorable impression, all those good folks who are now the first to sing the national anthem, and the loudest. Hypocrites wrapping themselves in the red, white, and blue—I’ve seen too many of them with their arms stretched out in the Nazi salute.”

“You helped Rosie find a hiding place?” This was the first time I’d had any news of her.

“I did,” Levine answered. “At the Salomons’ urgent request. But I heard later that she was picked up anyway. Betrayed, I believe, by the very people who’d been hiding her, because she hadn’t been able come up with any more money than the amount I had already shelled out. Which only goes to show that evil isn’t limited to just one nation.”

I swallowed, and steeled myself. I had to stick with what I had come to do; our company’s future depended on it, and my cousin back in London was waiting to hear the outcome of this meeting. “I think I’ll save my opinion of the Dutch for later, Rafaël. That isn’t what I’ve come to discuss right now. First can you explain to me how it is that you were spared? What did you have to do to make that happen?” I asked, fixing him with a haughty stare.

“I shall answer your questions, my good Motke,” said Levine, “since I gather you are curious to know if my conscience is bothering me. Well, I can tell you this much: I torment myself day in, day out, wondering if I did enough, if I could have done more, if I should have gotten my hands even dirtier. I still don’t know if my children and grandchildren are alive, and every night I torture myself trying to imagine the horrors they may have gone through and, should they still be alive, the state they’ll be in when they finally do return from that hell. I weigh all that I did,
and especially all that I did
not
do, on a calibrated scale, and then ask myself—did I do enough? Every hour I spent asleep or collapsed on the sofa, every meal I ate, every time I hesitated to go back to pestering my vile contacts with yet another request, or was too exhausted either to write one more letter or to return to that horrible building to debase myself with yet another desperate spiel—so many occasions when I failed to do what I might have done. These war years may have turned me into a barrel of self-reproach, but that barrel is not filled with the poison you are talking about. Yes, Motke, I did use my connections. I did try to trade my Farmacom shares for exit papers for my family, and for nearly two long years I truly believed that we would be given permission to leave. I filled out truckloads of forms, I wheedled and fawned and licked their boots. I reminded a top general in the Führer’s own inner circle about the good old days when we served together in Flanders.”

He gave a bitter laugh and went on. “I even tried to convince that scumbag Rajakowitch—Eichmann’s right-hand man, the one responsible for practically every Dutch deportation—of my international prominence and my economic value to the Aryan nation. I got Willem Mengelberg, the conductor of the Amsterdam Concertgebouw Orchestra, whom the Dauphine’s love of music had brought into our circle of friends but who was also popular with the brownshirts, to intercede for me. I bragged that in the First World War I had voluntarily returned to Germany to serve my fatherland. I waved the Iron Cross I’d earned for my devotion to the German cause in their faces, and I even reminded them that I had kept my German nationality until 1932. Reprehensible conduct on my part, Motke, to be sure. It wasn’t pretty; it won’t win me any accolades. I am not proud of it. But all that haggling did result in our being granted deferments, and
dispensation from having to wear that revolting yellow star. I don’t know if it will comfort you to know that in the end, we too were called up. That all the trouble I’d gone through, and all the groveling I’d done, had been for nothing. We were to report to the transit camp for deportation. Only the summons came just as the trains stopped running and the enemy was as good as beaten. If D-Day had happened just one month later, you wouldn’t be sitting here putting me through the wringer; you’d be writing my obituary instead. But perhaps you’d have preferred that outcome, rather than having to confront me now. So there you have it: my scandalous conduct.”

He’d been slowly twirling his fountain pen in his hands. Now he put it down and looked up. “Just for the record, I now have a question for you, Motke. I understand that when you boarded that diplomatic train you were seen off by the deputy of Minister Von Ribbentrop himself. I should like you to tell me how you feel about that rather remarkable circumstance. Is your conscience quite clear about Von Ribbentrop’s signature permitting you to run out on everything and everyone? Was it fine, in your view, to take advantage of that powerful crook’s scrawl, while my desperate scramble to keep myself and my fellow man out of a living hell was a disgrace? How do you justify
that
, in your kingdom of self-righteousness? Let me guess. I think that from your comfortable ivory tower in London it was easy to look down your nose at your friends’ last-ditch struggles to stay alive. It’s like putting a bunch of rats in a steep-sided box, topped with a mesh roof to make sure they can’t escape, filling it with water, and then watching the rats panic, run out of steam, and drop dead one by one. That’s how you looked on from a safe distance. How easy, then, to pass judgment on what went on over here.