by Yehuda Avner
Dan took the sheet. He scanned it and frowned. It had been filed on behalf of a science teacher from Leipzig, unemployed for six years since Jews were banned from the schools. He searched the page for something that would have prompted Eichmann’s curious reaction. Then he realized it wasn’t the teacher whose details stood out. The signature at the bottom of the page and on the embassy stamp were usually filled out by Dan, but the volume of requests for visas these days was so great the rest of the staff had taken to signing—no Jew was refused, after all. Most often, Shmulik’s wife Devorah completed the applications in between coding messages to Tel Aviv. This one bore the perfect penmanship of a man accustomed to creating pleasing things with his hands.
“Is that signed by the Wilhelm Gottfried?” Eichmann whispered.
“He’s my first secretary, responsible for cultural affairs.” Dan laid the sheet on the desk.
Eichmann touched the signature reverently. “I must hear him play.”
Chapter 23
Shmulik shot to his feet. “You’re insane,” he shouted. He grabbed Gottfried’s shoulders. The virtuoso sat hunched before Dan’s desk. “This is going too far. Don’t you understand the danger you’re placing this man in?”
“Certainly I do,” Dan replied.
“I don’t believe this. You want him to play for Eichmann? Now we’re entertaining the Nazis?”
“Eichmann is an aficionado of the violin. Eichmann is also the man in control of Jewish emigration. As long as we keep him content, we get Jews to Israel. Gottfried is a favorite performer of Eichmann’s. His music would go a long way to keeping Eichmann on our side.”
“On our side?” Shmulik slapped his head. “Listen to yourself. You’re so busy dodging between the raindrops of Hitler’s ultimatum and the one the British left hanging over you that you don’t realize someone’s pissing on you.”
“Ben-Gurion wants diplomacy from us, not resistance.”
“You’re weak,” Shmulik bellowed. “You’re like an old shtetl Jew, sucking up to the goyim so that they don’t mistreat you, even though you know that whatever they do it won’t be fair to you. Knowing that they despise you. We’re Israelis now. Try to understand what that means. We don’t have to kiss their asses. We’re New Jews.”
“But the Jews of Germany aren’t Israeli,” Dan shouted. “They can die just like old Jews.”
Shmulik stomped to the window. The Gestapo detail loitered around the Mercedes outside, leering at the Jewish girls bringing their emigration applications into the embassy. “It’s completely fakakt, Dan,” he said.
“Well, I agree with you there.” Dan looked at Gottfried. There was some new glow in the man’s face. “What do you think, Wili?”
The slack skin around Gottfried’s jaw drew tight. Suddenly he looked younger. “I’d like to do it,” he whispered.
Dan turned to Shmulik. The Mossad chief was unconvinced. “What do you expect him to say? These performing artists will do anything for a round of applause.”
“You go too far, Shmulik.” Gottfried stood. He seemed to glide across the woodblock floor in a state of complete contentment. “I should merely like to shove my music down the throats of these Nazi bastards.”
Shmulik laughed. “Finally you’re speaking my language, Wili.”
It was Dan who was uncomfortable now. He wondered if it was only his music that Gottfried intended to force the Nazis to consume. Perhaps he had made a mistake. Gottfried might decide to make a statement at his performance, to condemn the Nazis. He could ruin everything with Eichmann. Dan cursed the first secretary’s signature on the documents. “On second thoughts, it might not be such a good idea,” he said. “After all, Eichmann could hardly come here to listen to you perform, and there’s nowhere else.”
“The Countess would be happy to host us.” Gottfried gestured toward the wall of Dan’s room, beyond which was Countess von Bredow’s mansion.
In a way he didn’t quite understand, the planned performance was getting out of Dan’s control. The Countess’s soirees were attended by critics of the regime. The last thing Dan needed was for Eichmann to connect him and his embassy with such people.
“So, when shall we bring Eichmann over for the show?” Shmulik grinned.
Diplomatic and political risks were now the least of Dan’s worries. He wouldn’t put it past Shmulik to try and kill Eichmann. “I order you to take no action against that man,” Dan said.
Shmulik shrugged and turned back to the window.
“I shall talk to the Countess about Eichmann,” Gottfried said. “She’ll want him to hear me.”
“Invite them all,” Shmulik said. “The Israeli ambassador deals with these Nazis as though Jews were stamps to be purchased over the counter at the post office. Why shouldn’t the first secretary have friendly relations too?”
Gottfried touched Shmulik on the arm. “Perhaps I shall play for Hitler someday.”
Dan jerked his head toward him in surprise.
Shmulik hugged Gottfried and kissed the older man’s brow. “You and I shall make that bastard dance to our tune,” Shmulik said.
Chapter 24
Bertha Polkes kneaded the mixture of diced veal and sardines, the breadcrumbs, eggs, parsley, and chopped onions. She scooped out balls of the mixture and dropped them into the simmering chicken broth while humming a tango she had heard before the nightclubs barred Jews.
Anna entered the kitchen, taking off her overcoat. “What a wonderful smell, Bertha.”
“Königsberger Klopse. I have to make myself useful around here. It’s good to have so much food available. For so long we’ve…” She stopped, reaching to wipe her tearful eyes, then remembered that her hands were covered in dumpling mix. She laughed in embarrassment. “I don’t mean that you have it easy. I just—”
Anna touched her wrist. “If you read my mother’s worried letters, you’d think I was already a prisoner of the Gestapo. But I can’t even begin to imagine how it has been for you, Bertha.”
“Let’s not talk about my problems. When I’m making dinner, I should focus on how lucky we are.”
“We’re lucky to have you here. Where’s Arvid?”
“He went to the Central Office for Jewish Emigration.”
“To the SS?” Anna couldn’t hide her alarm.
“Dan spoke to Eichmann about us. He thinks we could get some special dispensation to leave for Israel. To join our children there.”
“But you’re aliens. The SS would arrest you.”
“I thought it was a risk too. Arvid was convinced by Dan. He thinks Eichmann wants to help us get away from Germany.”
Anna tried to make her smile reassuring. “I’m sure he does. It’ll be just fine. Now I’m going to change before dinner. I’ve been running around from patient to patient all afternoon.”
Anna left behind the scent of meat and broth, but the fear stayed in her nostrils as she went up the stairs to her apartment. She found Dan dozing on the bed, fully clothed in his suit. He sprang upright when she entered.
“I just lay down for a minute and I dropped off. I’ve been so tired.” He rubbed his face and checked his pocket watch. “So late. Almost dinner time. I must go back to work.”
She stopped him on his way to the door. “You should rest.”
“So much still to do.”
“No.” Her voice was taut. It halted him. “I think you’re overtired. In fact, I think you’re making mistakes because of your tiredness.”
“What’re you talking about? What mistakes?”
“Danny, you sent Arvid Polkes to Eichmann.”
“The Sturmbannführer really wants to help. I’ve built a relationship with him over the last year and a half—”
“Do you even see what’s happening around us?”
He recoiled, surprised by her anger. She pushed the flat of her hand into his chest. Not to hurt him, to wake him up. To shake him from the bureaucratic torpor she believed had him in its grasp.
“I know all y
our arguments, Danny. But every day it gets worse. I see Jews beaten in the streets. I visit patients whose neighbors have disappeared, no one knows where to. Everyone’s starving, because they can’t work to earn money.”
“I know all this. It only makes my work more urgent.”
“Eichmann is one of them. He is not your friend.”
“I never said he was.”
“Then treat him as an enemy. Don’t send a sweet, naïve man like Arvid to him. What’re you going to tell Bertha if Arvid simply doesn’t come back?”
“Eichmann wouldn’t dare.”
“Why not? Are you going to lodge a protest with the German Foreign Ministry?” She spun around and went into the bathroom.
He followed her in. She took off her dress. He ran his hand over her bare shoulders. She shrugged away and removed her earrings.
“I’ve made mistakes, Anna. I know it.” He spoke softly, watching her face in the mirror. “But I’m doing my best to follow the path Ben-Gurion laid out for me. If I’m wrong about Eichmann, then everything’s a disaster. It would mean I simply couldn’t accomplish what I’m trying to do. He’s the man who allows me to get Jews out of Germany—out of all the other territories under Nazi control eventually too, I hope. Please don’t blame me for being blind to that possibility. It’s just too frightening.”
She relented. Her shoulders fell and she turned to embrace him. “Oh, Danny. I’m sorry. You don’t need pressure from me. You have enough of it.”
“I’m happy for you to tell me what you see happening. Just please don’t be angry with me. I’m doing my best.”
“I know, sweetheart.”
He kissed her. “What’s that smell?”
“I don’t know. It’s not perfume. That hasn’t been available for months.”
He grinned. “I didn’t mean you. It’s coming from downstairs. I think it’s chicken broth. Did Bertha make Königsberger Klopse?”
She slapped his chest playfully. He pulled her close.
Chapter 25
Heydrich was still, and quiet. He waited behind his desk for the head of the Central Office for Jewish Emigration to give the Hitler salute and snap his heels. He pointed toward the chair opposite and watched.
An examination by those blue eyes was like being cut by diamond. Eichmann had experienced it frequently. But he sensed something different here. He was being assessed, and Heydrich was uncertain. Eichmann had never seen that before. Uncertain of the task he was about to give to him. Surely not, he thought. That kind of confusion could never exist in the mind of the General—Eichmann believed this absolutely. Heydrich was uneasy because he needed to know that his underling Eichmann was up to the job, whatever it was. Eichmann sat down across from Heydrich, and drew himself up. He understood the General’s thoughts. He would not disappoint him.
“The Führer has ordered physical extermination,” Heydrich said. He paused, a long time, testing the effect of his words.
For a moment Eichmann didn’t grasp his meaning. He rolled the sentence through his mind as though Heydrich spoke in some foreign language in which Eichmann was not quite fluent. He means the Jews, he realized. He means all of them. To die.
Eichmann’s work had been dedicated to shipping the Jews away from Europe. That summer he had prepared a policy memo at the Führer’s request assessing the possibility of sending one million Jews to Madagascar, annually. The former French colony was too far away, and transports would be intercepted by the British Royal Navy. Palestine and, since its establishment, Israel, was the most effective solution. Ambassador Lavi was extremely malleable—Eichmann was confident the man would do whatever he demanded of him. After the invasion of the Soviet Union in the summer, the option of massive deportations to Siberia had also come into play. But Eichmann understood the pressure to rid Germany of the drag on resources created by the millions of Jews in their newly conquered territories. It was to this, he imagined, the Führer and Heydrich were reacting. And now he was to share their reaction.
Extermination. Heydrich licked his lips, watching him. Eichmann hadn’t considered a solution of such absolute violence before. Not out of any concern for Jews. His detestation of that race was all the greater for his work in proximity to them. But he wasn’t a violent man. He hated the sight of blood.
“Go and see Globocnik,” Heydrich said.
The SS-Brigadeführer in Lublin, Poland. An Austrian, but not Eichmann’s kind of Austrian. Two years ago, Heydrich had busted him to corporal for corruption. Then, when he needed a ruthless governor, Reichsführer-SS Himmler brought Globocnik back to command the eastern region of Poland around Lublin.
Eichmann held still. He wouldn’t move or show any reaction. He despised Globocnik, but he feared Heydrich would misinterpret any expression of dislike as disapproval of the plan to exterminate the Jews.
“The Führer has already given Globocnik instructions,” Heydrich said.
The Führer. It was his initiative. Or at least he had approved it. Eichmann remained still, but his heart rushed.
“Go take a look and see how Globocnik’s getting on with his program,” Heydrich said. “I believe he’s using Russian anti-tank trenches for exterminating the Jews.”
“Yes, Herr Obergruppenführer.”
“Report back to me after your trip to the east. We’ll have to make a formal plan, of course.”
“Certainly we shall need to understand the dimensions of our task. Statistically.”
“We can’t just shoot eight or nine million Jews in ditches. We’ll need something more efficient.”
Eichmann relaxed. This was his field. “If they are all to be exterminated, we will need facilities to dispose of about eleven million Jews.”
“Are there that many of them?”
“Six million in the current territories of the Reich. But if one includes those in European countries as yet not conquered, or neutral, the number rises to eleven million.”
“Of course, we must include all those. This is the Führer’s will.” Heydrich shifted his fingers over some papers on the desk. Perhaps to divert his attention from the Jews, or because he considered the matter closed, he whistled the rondo theme of Beethoven’s Violin Concerto in D Major.
Eichmann bowed a little in his chair. He felt proud that he had passed Heydrich’s examination and was entrusted with this command from the Führer. He cleared his throat. “Did you know,” he said, “that Wili Gottfried is in Berlin?”
Chapter 26
Dan came out into the evening chill of Berlin in early fall. He waved away Draxler’s Gestapo watchers, to let them know he wasn’t going far, and walked along the sidewalk a dozen yards to the home of the Countess von Bredow.
The butler who opened the door looked more like a Prussian aristocrat than the Countess did. He lurched in stately fashion to the salon on the first floor, and Dan followed under the glare of the old nobles in the portraits on the walls. He settled into a sofa that gave off the delicate reek of an antique and waited for the lady of the house.
Footsteps came down the stairs fast. Not a woman’s tread. Dan stood to greet whoever it was.
Brückner entered the salon in full uniform. Hitler’s liaison to the Wehrmacht angled his head aggressively toward the Israeli ambassador.
“Do you have any idea of the dangers you people are creating for my aunt?” Brückner kept his voice low, but it was all the more emphatic for that.
“I certainly didn’t intend—”
“She’s upstairs now.” Brückner’s arm shot out as if in the Hitler salute. “With your—your first secretary.”
Dan glanced at the ceiling. Upstairs? He couldn’t exactly ask what intimacy that implied between Gottfried and the Countess, but the fury of the young officer before him signaled that more might be happening between the two sixty-year-olds than a game of bridge in the dressing room.
“And now you turn up. What the hell do you people expect of her?” Brückner slammed his hand down on the mantelpiece and stared into the
fire.
“My dear Hauptmann Brückner, I believe the relationship between your aunt and Herr Gottfried is an old one. I apologize for the trouble it appears to cause you, but I don’t see that I can do anything about it.”
“You could send him back to Israel.” Brückner turned to face Dan. “Get him out of the way.”
Shunting people around the globe certainly seemed to be a fetish among these Nazis. Even when it concerned affairs of the heart, rather than matters of blood. “Wouldn’t that upset your aunt? She’s quite fond of him, isn’t she?”
“She’s fond of peach schnapps. She claims to be in love with this—this man.”
The last word came out in a stutter. Dan knew that it had been substituted for “Jew.” He had sucked up a great deal of abuse for the sake of diplomacy, to protect the chance for Jews to emigrate, to save their lives even. But this concerned love. As he watched the Wehrmacht captain tremble with rage, he thought of Anna in the embassy next door, and he knew that he would rather be dead than without love. Men like this could call him Jew and heap their hate upon him, but he would always find an inner strength. He’d find it with his wife, and he would feel her presence even if they were separated. Brückner could have drawn the Luger from his holster and shot him down, but Dan would have departed the world happy, and not alone.
“This man?” He shook his head. “Let’s call him what he is—at least as far as he is seen in this country. Let’s say this Jew. This Jew is the most talented musician I have ever heard, Hauptmann Brückner. And your aunt shows greater humanity than other Germans in responding to Wili Gottfried’s talent and personal qualities, rather than to his race.” Dan shook as much as the adjutant now. The adrenaline that he suppressed and diverted into the pit of his stomach when in conversation with Eichmann or Draxler, or even Shmulik, coursed through him freely.