‘Eat,’ said Dietrich Dominick. He cradled Juergen’s head in the crook of his arm, holding a spoonful of that wretched soup in front of Juergen’s mouth. But Juergen kept his mouth pressed shut. Dietrich had been a Lutheran pastor. He was in Dachau because he had written, signed, and then circulated among his fellow pastors an open letter to the Führer criticizing his racial policies. Like Martin Niemöller, who would eventually land in Dachau himself, Dietrich Dominick had been an anti-Semite and ardent nationalist to begin with, but had, as he said in his letter, renounced nationalism and anti-Semitism as antithetical to his Christian faith. ‘Please eat,’ said Dietrich. ‘For the love of God.’
Juergen just stared past Dietrich and said nothing. What did the love of God mean to him? Juergen was taken to the infirmary the next day and was never seen again.
Everyone in Dachau found himself forced into a sort of existential solitude, and if you allowed yourself to become truly alone, you would go mad or die. Willi had been a solitary person most of his life, but while solitary, he had also always believed that the only way forward for humanity was humanity itself. And so now he struggled not to allow his instinct for solitude to keep him away from his fellow prisoners. For better or worse, they were a community. They shared everything now. He could even sympathize with Neudeck’s rage. In Neudeck’s mind, Willi had sent him to hell.
In addition to the physical work each man was forced to do, which seemed beyond endurance, there was also the mental and emotional work. In Dachau you were quickly reduced to your essence. You consisted entirely of what your body and mind could do, and were held fast by what they could not do. You were alone with your fears, and they were abundant. You were alone in your own particular anguish, which was profound. And you were alone with your hope. ‘The miserable,’ Shakespeare reminded him, ‘have no other medicine, but only hope.’
All of the prisoners hoped to survive somehow, to come out of this on the other side, whether in this life or another. But each man’s hope had its own shape and dimensions which were molded and formed by his life experience, by the choices he had made, by his beliefs, dreams, and aspirations, by the happiness and unhappiness he had known, by what he saw as possible. Some had grandiose hopes. Some just wanted to be returned to their families. Some found hope in the idea of freedom, in just the thought of not being locked up. Neudeck was like that. He dreamed of being on the street again, up to no good, finding a woman.
For Willi, hope was not about anything he wanted. Hope was just something he had. Hope was like fuel. It was propulsive, it was in his muscles and bones and not in his mind. He was not conscious of hope. He did not hope to see Lola again: he expected to see Lola again.
Hope entered his body with every breath and never left. He did not know where it came from; he might not even have known it was there. Once when he was asked if he was ever hopeful, he answered, ‘What do you mean?’ When he was carrying rocks, or breaking rocks, or even suffering torture, even there, his hope was just something that was present, like his heartbeat, a small kernel, a flame that would not be extinguished. When he finally realized that about himself, he was amazed.
The First Interrogation
After two weeks of breaking rocks, Willi’s crew was harnessed to heavy rollers which they pulled non-stop back and forth over the crushed rock to create the road bed. The rocks tore through their shoes and bloodied their feet. The ropes and timbers of the roller tore at their arms and shoulders and necks. However, this work, as terrible as it was, had the advantage, if you could call it that, of tying a group of men to one load so that the stronger could help the weak.
Dachau, the prison camp, was surrounded by a no man’s land overseen by machine gunners in towers with orders to shoot anyone in or even near this ‘death zone.’ Beyond the death zone was a high fence of reinforced concrete posts and multiple strands of electrified barbed wire.
Once Willi’s team had finished the road bed to the engineer’s satisfaction, they were marched out the gate and into the marshland beyond the fence where they were to clear boulders from the muck and prepare the ground to be cultivated. They were guarded by SS men. All you had to do was look like you were thinking of running, and the SS guards would shoot you down.
One morning Willi was called out at roll call. He was marched by Franz Neudeck to another part of the camp where the old armaments factory had been, to a square stone building that had been reconfigured for interrogations and punishment. Once inside, Neudeck pushed Willi ahead of him down a long concrete corridor lined with heavy wooden doors crisscrossed by iron straps. These might have been prison-cell doors, except they dated from the building’s early days as an armory. They stopped by one such door, and Neudeck knocked and then entered, again pushing Willi ahead of him.
They were in a small room, no more than four by four meters. An SS Hauptsturmführer, a captain, sat at a table. Carefully arrayed on the table in front of him, as if on display, were his hat, an open portfolio, and an oxtail whip, made up of multiple strands of wire. A second SS man stood beside the captain. He looked to Willi to be a boy barely out of school. Two kapos stood against the wall behind them, just under a small window, the source of the only light in the room. Attached to the wall to Willi’s left were some heavy canvas straps.
The captain signaled Neudeck that he should leave. Willi stood at attention while the captain leafed through the papers in the portfolio, turning back and forth until he settled on one. ‘Shall I call you Herr Geismeier or Herr Juncker?’ said the captain.
Willi didn’t answer.
‘Geismeier, then,’ said the captain. ‘According to your file, Geismeier, there was a time when you were a good policeman. You closed a lot of cases. You were highly decorated, weren’t you?’ He looked up expectantly, but Willi remained silent.
‘Fine,’ said the captain, as though he considered Willi’s silence a response. ‘You didn’t like the rules or regulations, though, did you?’
Again, Willi said nothing.
‘I see,’ said the captain. ‘You thought you were of a higher order, didn’t you? You could operate outside the rules, beyond the laws. You disobeyed your superiors because you thought you were smarter than they were?’
Silence.
‘Is that really the way you want to play this, Geismeier? Let’s try once more, shall we?’
Willi knew how this worked. The captain played a patient man. He even said ‘I am a patient man’ at one point. Willi understood the captain would then choose a moment to lose his patience, and his rage would come suddenly and violently. Then Willi would be strapped to the wall and beaten.
‘When did you last see your Fräulein Zeff? We have her in custody, you know.’
Willi had been expecting the captain would say this or something like it. There was no way to know for certain whether it was true or not, but Willi doubted it. He and Lola had made contingency plans to get her away from Munich. But even if it was true, nothing he could say now would save her.
‘We know about Schleiffer, your neighbor, too,’ said the captain.
This gave Willi comfort. There was nothing to know about Willi and Schleiffer. The captain was either fishing or laying a trap. Either way, it meant they had only general knowledge about Willi’s more recent misbehavior, but no specifics, no names, no places, no actions. In fact, the more questions the captain posed, the more he gave Willi the rough outlines of what they knew about him and what they didn’t know. They didn’t know much.
The captain wanted to know who, for instance, among Willi’s higher-ups during his time as a detective, had been directing him in his treasonous behavior. Who were his confederates among the police and detectives he knew? Bergemann? Gruber? Wendt? Who had wanted Otto Bruck killed? What were Willi’s connections to the Communist Party? Why had he recently been impersonating a detective?
The captain surprised Willi in one regard: he did not lose patience. When, after a considerable amount of time, he had gotten no response of any kind from Will
i, and the only thing left to do was punish him, the captain still leafed through the file folder one more time, looking for more questions to ask, looking for some way he could continue the interview and forestall the punishment. Whatever allure inflicting pain had once held for him, it was long gone by now.
The captain rose from his chair, picked up his hat and put it on his head. He fussed with it a bit, getting it just right, delaying again, Willi thought, what they both knew to be inevitable. ‘You leave me no choice, Geismeier.’ They always said something like that. He picked up the file folder and left the room.
The two kapos who had stood silent and motionless against the wall the entire time now stepped forward, seized Willi, pulled off his jacket and shirt, and wrapped the leather straps tightly around his biceps with him facing the wall. The larger of the two picked up the whip and without hesitation began lashing at Willi’s back.
As the first blow struck, Willi was already elsewhere in his mind. It was a stormy spring day. The wind was whistling and driving hail down on them. He and Lola had been hiking around the Murnauer Moos. He wore shorts, a jacket, and a cap. It had been sunny earlier. He had finally broken in his boots and they no longer hurt, so they were running, seeking shelter, their steps pounding along the path. There was a chunk of black bread, Emmental cheese, and a bottle of water in his backpack. It bounced and crashed against his back with each step. There was a sweater too, he remembered. Suddenly they were swimming in the icy Riegsee until their skin could stand it no longer. Lola laughed as they ran from the water, shaking the water droplets from her body like a dog might, shaking and laughing. The sun danced in the droplets. The lake shimmered. The sun scooted from behind a cloud. It began to shower lightning all around them, then snow began falling in great gouts. The last thing Willi remembered was Lola rolling in a snowdrift and pulling him down on top of her.
Hearing shouts and screams, the captain came running back into the room and found the young SS man beating Willi’s torn and bloody back, kicking at his legs, and screaming like a wild animal caught in a trap. Willi hung on the floor from the straps, obviously unconscious, while the boy slashed at his body again and again and again, shrieking with each blow.
This boy, a seventeen-year-old who had finished his training just weeks earlier, had seen an opportunity. He had cursed the kapo and declared the beating he was administering weak, inadequate. He had torn the whip from the kapo’s hand, pushed the man aside, and flailed away in blind desperation. This would show his worth, this would teach the others in the barracks not to mock him. This would put an end to all the teasing about his thin, hairless chest, his baby face.
The captain yelled ‘Stop!’ three times and finally seized the boy’s arm before he stopped. The boy’s shirt was soaked with sweat and flecked with Willi’s blood. His face was red, his eyes were wild, and his body was heaving with his panting. ‘We don’t want him dead yet,’ said the captain.
The Riegsee
In one of those peculiar and meaningless coincidences that are sprinkled throughout life and usually go unnoticed, Lola found herself beside the Riegsee at the very moment Willi was being whipped, the very lake Willi had dreamed of as he was being beaten senseless. Thunder clouds were building over the lake and she was taking in laundry, pulling sheets and towels off the line and stuffing the clothes pins in her apron pocket. She almost tripped over Mephi, the big black poodle. He barked happily. He had fallen in love with Lola on the day she had come up the walk for the first time, and now he followed her constantly.
‘You’re not helping, Mephi,’ she said, laughing.
Mephi belonged to Fedor Blaskowitz. Fedor had named him for Mephisto, who first appears as a poodle in Goethe’s Faust. Fedor, Mephi and Lola lived in the steep-roofed, green cottage beside the lake. It was Fedor who, alerted by Bergemann, had gone to the Mahogany Room the day after Willi’s arrest to warn Lola, and to escort her to the first stop on her flight from Munich.
By the time Detective Sergeant Gruber showed up at the hotel to question and, if need be, arrest her, Lola was gone.
‘Where did she go?’ Gruber demanded.
Alex Kuzinski, the hotel manager said, ‘She got sick. She was vomiting.’ This was not a lie. The news from Blaskowitz had made her ill. ‘I ordered her to the hospital,’ said Alex. This was a lie. Alex was taking a big risk by lying about something Gruber could easily check. But Alex cared about Lola and could tell she was in trouble. What other choice did he have? And Gruber, true to form, didn’t check.
Bergemann had given Blaskowitz exact instructions. Lola and Blaskowitz had taken a taxi to an intersection not far from the Lerchenau Bicycles shop. They watched the taxi drive off and then walked the last few blocks to the shop.
On hearing the password, Gerd Fegelein, the one-time burglar, sprang into action. Many years retired from the only occupation he had ever truly enjoyed, Fegelein was pleased to be employed once again in illicit activity. He escorted Lola and Fedor a few blocks further to a safe house, a basement storeroom in an apartment building. The room was full of tools and equipment, but also had a bed and a few sticks of furniture.
Seeing how distraught Lola was in these early hours of her flight, Fegelein offered to visit her apartment and bring her whatever she might need to make her life a bit more comfortable and mitigate her distress. Blaskowitz was horrified. ‘Are you crazy? Her apartment will be watched,’ he said.
‘Of course it will,’ said Fegelein. He seemed to relish the thought. He described some of his professional successes for Blaskowitz, like the time he got away with some Fabergé knickknacks from the bedroom of a certain prince, while a party was going on in the very next room. ‘The apartment was on the top floor, by the way.’
‘But you were younger then, weren’t you?’ said Blaskowitz. ‘And you were eventually caught.’
‘But that was by Willi,’ Fegelein said, as though that didn’t count. Fegelein would not be dissuaded. He even asked Lola whether there was anything in particular that she wanted. He was happy for the adventure.
Lola lay down on the bed and almost immediately fell asleep. When she woke up many hours later, she was alone. A small lamp on the wobbly little table by the bed was burning dimly. And someone had brought a plate with some grapes, some cheese, a hunk of dark bread, and a kitchen knife. Bedside the bed stood a small cardboard suitcase, her suitcase, which, when she opened it, contained some toiletries, some clothes, including, for whatever reason, the green dress.
Now that Detective Sergeant Gruber had arrested Willi, he seemed determined to find Lola as well. He ordered his detectives to stake out her apartment. Bergemann was assigned to be part of the stakeout, but even though he was there the night Fegelein visited, he didn’t see anything. Fegelein went in over the roof and down the airshaft.
After two days Bergemann decided it would be safer if Lola left Munich altogether, and Fegelein had to agree. Blaskowitz offered to take her to the green house on the Riegsee, and that seemed the perfect solution.
Years earlier Fedor Blaskowitz had been a teacher of Greek and Latin at the Herder Gymnasium in Munich. While there, he had been blackmailed because of his homosexuality and forced by the notorious Otto Bruck, the school headmaster at the time, to give false evidence in a murder investigation. Fedor could have been charged with obstruction of justice and sent to prison, and Willi had helped him extricate himself from that situation. Fedor soon left Munich for Murnau, where he had found another teaching position.
Fedor’s brush with criminality and his friendship with Willi had changed everything for him. He didn’t think of himself as a brave man by any measure, but he was no longer the fearful man he had once been either. And because Fedor had experienced injustice followed by justice, he became devoted to the cause of justice, and to Willi, whom he saw as an instrument of justice. He knew that by bringing Lola to Murnau he was placing himself in danger, but that didn’t matter to him.
They could not very well take the train to Murnau; the SS wou
ld be watching the trains. And Fedor did not drive or own a car. Bergemann asked Frau Schimmel whether she had anyone who could help, and of course she did. At the appointed hour on Saturday morning a young man named Pierre drove up and stopped outside the safe house. Frau Schimmel had sent him, he said. He knew the password which he pronounced with a French accent.
He was a fast and sure driver. He drove in silence. A little over an hour later they all got out at the green house by the lake. Mephi was excited to see them and danced around Lola’s legs barking as they walked to the door. Pierre insisted on carrying Lola’s suitcase.
It was lunchtime and Fedor opened a bottle of wine. He brought out a loaf of black bread, some ham, cheese, apples, and some pickles he had made the summer before. Because it was a sunny, unseasonably warm day with only the slightest breeze coming off the lake, he flung a red and white checked tablecloth across the rustic picnic table outside the back door. They sat down on the benches by the table, and the three of them had a relaxed picnic lunch as though they hadn’t a care in the world. Mephi dozed at their feet.
Frau Schimmel Again
Bertha Schimmel’s doctor told her that the sharp pain she had been experiencing in her legs indicated that her cancer had spread further throughout her body. The tests he performed confirmed that she probably had less than a year to live. He was surprised and bit horrified when she laughed at the news.
‘Come now, Doctor,’ she said. ‘Why are you surprised? You know me. You know all about me.’
This was true. The doctor was only a few years younger than Bertha, and had been her doctor since before she became Bertha Schimmel. In addition to knowing her real name, he knew she was Jewish, knew she was a former revolutionary, and thought that she was probably somehow involved at this very moment in something subversive. As a socialist and a Jew himself, he knew what fate might await her if she fell into the hands of the regime.
The Constant Man Page 16