War and Remembrance (48 page)

Having said all this, Beck sat back, relaxed and smiling. “Well, Prothessor? How does it strike you?”

“Dear me, I confess I’m bewildered. Would they want me to discuss something in my field of work, like Constantine?”

“Oh, no, no. Absolutely out of the question! They want a philosophical view of the war, simply showing that all the right is not on one side. Remember what you said in this very room, Dr. Jastrow, on the occasion of our famous veal dinner? That would precisely fill the bill.”

“Oh, but Werner, I’d had far too much wine that night. I couldn’t rail against my own country like that on enemy shortwave. You can see that.”

Pursing his lips around the cigar, Beck cocked his head. “Professor, you’re creating difficulties, aren’t you? You’re a genius in the use of words, and in the subtle elaboration of ideas. You have a great original vision of this world catastrophe, a remarkable God’s-eye view of the whole tragic panorama. That theme of ‘sharing the hegemony’ is perfect. Once you put your mind to it, the words would come easily. I’m sure you’d not only please Rome Radio, but impress your own countrymen as well. And to state matters bluntly, you’d get out of Italy at once.”

Jastrow turned to his niece. “Well?”

“Well, you and Ezra Pound,” said Natalie.

An unpleasant expression flashed across Beck’s jowly face. “Comparisons are odious, Mrs. Henry.”

“What about Berenson and Santayana?” Jastrow asked. “Have they agreed to this?”

Beck took a long puff at the cigar. “The Italian radio people consider you the key personality. Santayana is very old, and as you know he lives up in the clouds, with his theory of essences and all that philosophical mumbo-jumbo. He’ll just mystify people. Still, a great name. Berenson, well, Berenson’s whimsical and very independent. Rome Radio feels they’ll get Berenson once you agree. He thinks very highly of you.”

“Then neither of them knows about this yet,” Natalie said.

Reluctantly Beck shook his head.

“No, no, no!” Jastrow suddenly rapped out. “I can’t possibly become bracketed with Ezra Pound. His critical writings are undeniably brilliant. He has an original mind, though his verse is willfully obscure. The few times
we’ve met I’ve found him an untidy, overbearing egotist, but that’s neither here nor there. The thing is, I’ve heard his broadcasts, Werner. His attacks on the Jews are worse than anything even on your Berlin broadcasts, and his wild ravings about Roosevelt and the gold standard are simple treason. After the war he’ll be hanged or shut up in an insane asylum. I can’t imagine what’s gotten into him, but I’d rather rot here in Siena than become another Ezra Pound.”

With a curl of his lips, and a total confusion of f’s and th’s, Beck retorted, “But there’s also the question of Mrs. Henry and her baby ‘rotting here.’ And there’s the more serious question of how long you can stay on in Siena.” He pulled out a gold pocket watch. “I’ve made a long trip to put this before you. I didn’t expect a rejection out of hand. I thought I had earned your confidence.”

Natalie interjected, “What’s the question about our staying in Siena?”

Deliberately crushing out the cigar, grinding it on the ashtray, Beck replied, “Why, the OVRA pressure never lets up on me, Mrs. Henry. You realize that you belong in a concentration camp with the rest of the alien Jews. I was reminded of this very pointedly, when the broadcasting idea came up, and —”

“But I can’t fathom this!” Jastrow expostulated, his flecked little hands shaking on the table before him. “We’re
guaranteed
eventual passage to Switzerland! Aren’t we? Even Leslie Slote’s new letter affirms that. How can Rome Radio blackmail me into wrecking my reputation? Just be firm, Werner. Tell them to put it out of their minds. I won’t consider it.”

Beck rolled his bloodshot eyes at Natalie. “That, I must tell you, is a grave statement, Professor.”

“Nevertheless, that’s my answer,” cried Jastrow, his excitement mounting, “and it’s final.”

An auto horn sounded outside.

“Dr. Beck, are you expecting a taxi?” Natalie folded her napkin on the table. Her tone was low and calm. Her face seemed all bones and eyes.

“Yes.”

“Let me walk out with you. No, Aaron, don’t you come.”

“Werner, if I seem obstinate, I’m sorry.” Jastrow stood up and held out an unsteady hand to Dr. Beck, “Martin Luther once put it well.
Ich kann nicht anders.

Beck stiffly bowed, and went out after Natalie. On the terrace, she said, “He’ll do it.”

“He’ll do what? The broadcasting?”

“Yes. He’ll do it.”

“Mrs. Henry, his resistance was very strong.” Beck’s eyes were hard, questing, anxious.

From behind the gate came the cracked wheeze of the horn again.

“I know him well. These explosive reactions pass. I set him off by mentioning Pound, f m terribly sorry. When does Rome Radio want him?”

“That’s not definite,” Beck said eagerly, “but what I must imperatively have from him at once is a letter consenting to make the broadcasts. That will get the hounds off my back, and start the wheels turning — the wheels of your release, Mrs. Henry.”

“You’ll have the letter by the end of the week.”

They were at the open gate, where a large old touring car was waiting. Beck said in harsh harried tones, “I’d raffer bring fee letter back to Rome now. Fat would take a vast load oth my mind. I’d even postpone my return.”

“I can’t press him when he’s in this mood. I promise you the letter will come.”

He stared at her, and with a decisive flourish held out his hand. “I must count on your good sense, then.”

“You can count on my concern for my baby.”

“The greatest pleasure for me,” said Beck, pausing with his hand on the taxicab door, “will be to see you all off to Zurich. I’ll be waiting anxiously for that letter.”

She hurried back into the villa. Jastrow still sat at the dining table, wineglass in hand, staring out at the cathedral. With a hangdog look at her, he said in a voice that still trembled, “I just couldn’t help it, Natalie. The proposal is outrageous. Werner can’t think like an American.”

“Indeed he can’t. But you shouldn’t have turned him down flat, Aaron. You’ll have to equivocate and stall.”

“Possibly. But I’ll never make the broadcasts he’s asking for. Never! He took my perverse half-serious tirade over the veal far too literally. There’s a German for you! You had provoked me, I’d drunk a lot, and anyway I relish arguing on the wrong side. You know that. Of course I loathe the Axis dictatorships. I exiled myself to save money and live quietly. Clearly it was the mistake of my life. No matter how badly the State Department has mistreated me, I love the United States. I will not go on the air for the Axis, to disgrace my scholarship and mark myself a traitor.” The old man lifted his bearded chin, and a stony look settled on his face. “They can kill me, but I won’t do it.”

Alarmed, and thrilled too, Natalie said, “Then we’re in danger.”

“That may be, and you had better consult Dr. Castelnuovo about his escape plans, after all.”

“What!”

“Making a dash for it seems farfetched, but it may come to that, my dear.” Pouring a glass of wine, Jastrow spoke with cheery vigor. “Rabinovitz is a very able man. This young doctor seems a resolute sort. It’s best to be prepared. Chances are our release will come through meantime, but I can’t say I like Werner Beck’s new tune.”

“Christ almighty, Aaron, this is a change.”

Jastrow rested his head wearily on a hand. “I didn’t bargain for adventuring in my old age, but the one important thing is to get you and Louis out safely, isn’t it? I shall have this wine and take my nap Please draft up a letter to Werner, dear, agreeing in principle, and apologizing for my outburst. Say I’m commencing now to lay out four broadcasts. Be terribly vague about a completion date, for I shall be weaving Penelope’s cloth, you know. Then you had better go and talk to that young doctor. The OVRA may well be watching him, so it’s best you make it look like an office visit. Take the baby.”

Dumbly Natalie nodded. She went to the library to draft the letter, feeling — half with terror, half with relief— that the lead had in an eyeblink passed from her to her uncle, and that she and her baby were now in the dark rapids.

J
UNE
flowers are springing up all over Auschwitz. Even in the muddy heavily trodden camp sectors, in nooks between the blockhouses missed by the wooden clogs of the prisoners, the flowers peep out.

The Auschwitz Interest Area of the SS spreads over some forty square kilometers of greenery and woodland, at the confluence of the Sola and the Vistula, where the Vistula begins its long meander north to Warsaw and the Baltic Sea. Everywhere inside the high barbed-wire fences of this huge enclave, spaced with signs in German and Polish warning of instant death to trespassers, wildflowers make bright splashes, except where construction crews are churning the marshy grassland into brown muck and putting up blockhouses. Berel Jastrow is working in one of these crews.

The peasants who dwelled in the villages within the enclave are gone. A few of their evacuated thatched houses still stand. Most have been razed and their rubble used in camp blockhouses. Near the mucky holes where the houses once stood, fruit orchards in bloom perfume the warm June winds. The sweet odors die in the rows of prison blocks with their terrible latrine huts. But out in the fields where Berel is working, the orchards still sweetly scent the air. In the past six months Berel has been gaining back some of his old gnarled strength. As an assistant foreman to Sammy Mutterperl, with the armband of a
Vorarbeiter,
a leading worker, he eats and sleeps better than most Auschwitz inmates, though wretchedly enough.

Mutterperl wears the armband of an
Unterkapo.
But he is something more. The
Arbeitskommando,
work gang, of SS Sergeant Major Ernst Klinger, is actually a construction crew managed by Mutterperl; six hundred inmates of two blockhouses in Camp B-I. The job here is the rush construction of Camp B-II-d Birkenau, one of six subcamps of thirty-two blockhouses each. Completed, the whole sector will have one hundred fifty blockhouses in all, planned by the Central Building Board for erection north of the main roadway. With a twin sector, B-III, not yet begun, and B-I, already standing, Birkenau
is
projected by the Central Building Board as the largest detention center on earth. More than a hundred thousand working prisoners will be housed in Birkenau as slave labor for SS factories.

Sammy Mutterperl is doing in the Oswiecim prison camp what he did when he was a free man in Oswiecim town. He was a contractor there; in a
peculiar way he is a contractor here. His client now is the Commandant of Auschwitz, and Sergeant Major Klinger is the Commandant’s deputy on the spot. In theory Reichsfiihrer SS Himmler is the high ultimate Client, but Himmler
is
an unseen god in Auschwitz. Even the SS men speak his name seldom, and with awe. The Commandant’s chauffeured black Mercedes, however, is a familiar intimidating sight in the area, fluttering the double lightning-flash insignia flags of the SS. Berel glimpses it often. The Commandant believes in personal supervision from the top — “the eye of the master” is his word.

The Klinger gang has been turning out good work for many months, laboring in all weather, in haste, silence, and submissiveness. The crew routinely endures curses and beatings from SS men and the kapos. Prisoners who weaken, faint, and fall get beaten bloody by the kapos for malingering. If they really look done for, the kapos finish them off with shovels or sticks, and other workers drag back their bodies for evening roll call. Fresh prisoners, of which the supply
is
endless, replace them on the next shift.

As Auschwitz goes, Mutterperl considers Klinger’s a good kommando to serve in. He has been in Auschwitz for a year and a half. In 1941 the Commandant, desperate at the crazy expansion orders from Berlin, combed the countryside for builders and mechanics and put them to work at once —Jew, Pole, Czech, Croat, Rumanian, it made little difference, Mutterperl among them — in conditions of housing, nourishment, and discipline that were by outside standards unspeakable, but in Auschwitz something like luxury.

Sammy has come to know Auschwitz well. In on the ground floor,
so
to speak, he is surviving handily. Because of the rush to start construction he was spared quarantine camp, those fearsome isolation weeks of maltreatment and hunger which reduce many prisoners to bony automata, blank to any thought but self-preservation. Klinger as SS overseer and Mutterperl as Jew foreman have worked together since they did the SS barracks job a year ago. Both are wily burly fellows in their late fifties, anxious to produce results: Klinger to please his superiors, Mutterperl to stay alive. For his own benefit, Klinger has gradually pushed the Jew into an informal protected status as a construction foreman. As such, Sammy can recruit prisoners for the kommando. That is how he has rescued Berel. Pulling in a Russian prisoner is nonregulation procedure, but Auschwitz regulations have no consistency or coherence. SS noncoms and officers constantly trade off favors and loot, and bend the rules to suit themselves. Nobody is a better hand at such maneuvering than Hauptscharfiihrer Ernst Klinger.

Klinger is an old file of the camps, a stout blond Bavarian going gray. Like the Commandant, he is a veteran of Dachau and Sachsenhausen; in fact, the Commandant requisitioned him for Oswiecim. Once a policeman in Munich, turned Nazi when he lost his job in the depression, Klinger found in the SS a haven. Since toughness was a requirement, this once
easygoing family man became tough. In the line of duty Klinger has flogged the skin off prisoners’ backs, wiping the blood-dripping whip with a casual grin as the victim sagged raw and unconscious. He has lined up with execution squads and shot condemned men. His normal tone of communication with prisoners
is
a menacing bellow. With a blow of a club he can collapse a man like a scarecrow of sticks. Nevertheless, Sammy Mutterperl considers him “all right.” Klinger does not, like so many SS men and kapos, get his lacks from inflicting fear, pain, and death on terrified living skeletons. Moreover, he is very corrupt, which is a big help. You can do business with Klinger.