The Ambassador

by Yehuda Avner

  Höss slapped a hand on Eichmann’s shoulder. “I can read your lips, Herr Sturmbannführer, and I, too, was raised a Catholic. Don’t worry. It hits you hard at first. Try to think in terms of the process, rather than the individual suffering. And imagine how much worse it would be for these wretches if they were being buried half-alive in a pile with naked women and children all around them.”

  Eichmann shuddered. “You’re right, of course.”

  “I draw your attention to the economy of this entire process,” Höss said. “Thirteen cases of Zyklon B weighing 195 kilos cost 975 reichsmarks. Five kilos is sufficient for special treatment of 1,500 people in a single gas chamber. Thus, for a little less than one thousand reichsmarks, we can dispose of 42,000 Jews.”

  “Very good.”

  Höss unfolded a blueprint. “Based on the preliminary numbers you sent me—and I accept that they’re only preliminary—we ought to consider dividing the camp into three. Here we will construct the extermination chambers for the camp as a whole. You have observed the gas chamber. I propose to construct three more immediately. We also need to improve on the disposal of the bodies. You and I must consult on the design of crematoria to incinerate the bodies. They must be extremely powerful because of the sheer numbers involved. One point on that score—the Zyklon B works optimally at twenty-six degrees Celsius. My suggestion to the engineers would be to funnel the heat from the crematoria back to the gas chambers, thus warming them to the correct temperature for the Zyklon B to function at maximum efficiency.” He gestured to the southeast. “May we now address the factory for IG Farben?”

  “The tax exemptions have gone through for IG. The Reichsführer-SS is most eager for German companies to receive incentives to expand into the east. These, after all, will constitute the SS lands, our state. Where do you intend to build the factory?”

  “Just beyond the Vienna-Krakow rail line and the village of Auschwitz. The factory is designed to be operated by slave labor, of course.”

  “Good. Construction can begin right away. IG is the biggest industrial company in the Reich. Reichsführer Himmler is sure its involvement at Auschwitz will set a precedent for other German companies to work either in the east or with slave labor. Thyssen and Krupp are interested, for example. There is also a possibility of involving the German subsidiaries of Ford and General Motors.”

  Malnourished, middle-aged Poles dragged the dead Russians out of the gas chamber. Eichmann turned away.

  Höss folded the plans. “You can take these back to Berlin to show to the Reichsführer.”

  “Very good.” Eichmann gripped the blueprints hard to steady his shaking hands.

  Chapter 35

  The air-raid sirens wailed from the flak towers just after midnight. Dan and Anna dressed hurriedly and went down to the embassy basement. They joined the rest of the staff in the shooting gallery, dragging out the cushions and thin mattresses that Yardeni had rustled up after the first raids, more than a year earlier. Only one of the Israelis was absent.

  “Where’s Wili?” Anna said.

  “He’s with the Countess.” Devorah smirked. “If a bomb lands anywhere near here, our Wili will think it’s just the earth moving for him.”

  Shmulik laughed at his wife’s ribaldry. Anna blushed.

  They settled down, listening for the first blast. When it came, it was distant, a low grumble like thunder amid the popping of the anti-aircraft guns.

  “Charlottenburg,” Shmulik said. The bombs were falling to the west, on the bourgeoisie, the nightclubs, the department stores.

  The next impacts were closer, moving like giant footfalls down the center of the city.

  “What are they trying to hit?” Anna said. “What’s the target? There are no factories here. No armaments works.”

  “The Germans bombed London to sew terror. I’d say the Royal Air Force is content to let the Germans know, in return, that they aren’t safe anywhere. Except down in the Führer’s bunker.”

  Dan hugged his shivering wife. It was because of him that she was in a basement under bombardment from the air. She might have immigrated to Israel anyway had she never met him in the Harvard library, but most likely she’d still be in America, treating the sicknesses of small children at a hospital in New England. The worst discomfort she’d have faced would have been indigestion after too many pancakes at the diner.

  “It’s okay, sweetheart,” he said, in English.

  She pressed her head to his chest as the bombs crept across town.

  The sirens carried on, but the explosions halted. Then the allclear came. Shmulik got to his feet and stretched his back.

  “A sound more welcome than the shofar at the end of Yom Kippur,” Dan said.

  “If God has inscribed you in the book of life for another year, you’re the luckiest Jew in Berlin.” Shmulik reached for Devorah’s hand to help her to her feet.

  A massive blast sounded above them. The pound and roll and thud of falling walls and crushing wood and flying glass echoed through the basement. The lights went out and Dan felt a spray of dust enfold him. Anna gasped and held tightly to him.

  Devorah shrieked. Shmulik grabbed her. “Get out of here,” he yelled. “The embassy must’ve been hit.”

  Dan took hold of his wife and they stumbled to the stairs. Once upstairs in the lobby, they found the building was still intact.

  “But it was so loud,” Anna said. “Didn’t it hit us?”

  The sound of sliding masonry continued nearby. Dan rushed to the door and went out into the street. The hood of the Gestapo Mercedes had been crushed by a chunk of granite the size of a man and was almost enveloped by debris. Dan and Shmulik forced the door open and dragged Draxler out of the car. Blood ran from a wound on his head. They laid him on the sidewalk. Anna crouched over him, tending to him. Her hand trembled as she stanched the bleeding. Draxler opened his eyes. He looked up at Anna with longing.

  Rubble had folded a second Gestapo man forward in the passenger seat. Shmulik and Dan wrenched at the stones. When they came away, they found the man’s head crushed inside his fedora.

  Dan turned away from the sight and blinked through the cloud of dust. His embassy was standing, though the windows of every floor were shattered, but the house next door lay in ruins. The walls they had heard tumbling belonged to the Countess’s home. The bomb seemed to have landed at the furthest corner of the building, carving it into an ellipse, with the tall side buttressed by the embassy.

  “Wili and the Countess—they’ll be in the basement,” Dan said. “We have to get them out.”

  Shmulik stared at the destruction of the von Bredow home. At its lowest, the pile of stone was deeper than a man’s height. “We’ll never get through that.”

  “Let’s go in from our basement.” Dan ran back up the steps to the embassy.

  “That’s my office,” Shmulik called. “There are classified items in there. We can’t just smash a hole in the wall. It’s not safe.”

  Dan shook his head. Shmulik worried more about security than his colleague’s life. But the Mossad man was never swayed by anger— he had enough himself to outlast anyone who tried to berate him into conceding. So Dan shut his eyes a moment and calmed himself.

  He turned back and took hold of Shmulik’s shoulder. “You want to kill Hitler?”

  “At a time like this you’re still trying to talk me out of—”

  “I don’t know how you’re going to kill Hitler, but I do know that you’re going to do it somehow when he’s on his way to or from Gottfried’s performance.”

  Shmulik stared at the rubble, a scowl on his face, and Dan knew he had guessed right. The plan to assassinate the Führer was in the same state of collapse as the von Bredow mansion, unless they could get Gottfried out alive. “All right,” Shmulik said. “Let’s go.”

  They returned to the embassy. Shmulik called Yardeni and Richter after them. They descended to the basement. Devorah followed.

  “Get out of here,” Shmulik called
to her. “We don’t know if the building’s safe yet.”

  “You don’t know how to handle my code books. And I’m not so delicate. I’ll take care of this.” Devorah gathered the thick pads from her desk and bundled them up.

  Shmulik called to Richter, “Yossi, get all the documents from down here and burn them in the garden.”

  Yardeni braced his feet as he stood beside the connecting wall to the basement of the Countess’s house. He swung the sledgehammer at the center of the wall again and again. Within minutes, he was through both layers of brick. A thick puff of dust blew out of the hole he created, heavy air that lingered in the von Bredow mansion after the explosions.

  Dan called through to the Countess’s basement. “Wili, Countess, are you there?”

  Someone coughed in the dust beyond the breach.

  “Make this hole big enough for me to get through,” Dan said.

  Yardeni hammered away another section of brick. Dan slithered though and rolled onto the floor. Chunks of fallen masonry dug into his back. He came to his knees.

  “That hole has to be bigger,” he said. “We need to get them out that way. Keep at it.”

  Yardeni went back to work on the bricks.

  Dan crept through the dark space by the dim light from the embassy basement, then entered a second room where he had to move by feel only. Stepping forward, he bumped into a large, upright wine rack. Off balance already because of the bombing, the bottles tumbled to the floor and smashed. The tannins of the spilled wine attached to the dust and made him sputter.

  But the noise caught the attention of someone across the room.

  A woman mumbled, “Who’s that?”

  Dan shuffled toward her. “Countess von Bredow?”

  “Here.”

  He came to the woman. She clutched at him. “Wili. Help Wili.”

  “Was he with you?”

  She directed her eyes down along her body to the rubble that covered her middle. “There. He’s there.”

  Dan fumbled to clear the fallen bricks from the woman. A man lay over her, pinning her to the floor. Wili Gottfried’s features were coated in dust, and still. He must have thrown himself across his lover to protect her as the bomb exploded. Dan lifted him and lay him beside the Countess.

  “Is he alive?” she said.

  The violinist’s pulse was dim. But it was there. “He’s alive.”

  “His hands? Are his fingers injured?”

  The fingers that played the violin. Her insistent grip on his shirt forced Dan to reply. “I believe his hands are undamaged, Countess.”

  He picked up a glimmer of light reflected back from Gottfried’s eyes. They were open. A ragged breath caught in the man’s throat. He lifted his hand and pointed beyond the Countess.

  “My Stradivarius,” he croaked. “I must save it.”

  Dan half-smiled. He would have been only mildly surprised if Gottfried’s dive in the dark basement had been intended to save his violin, rather than his lover. Dan picked up the Countess. Gottfried lifted his violin case and came to his feet unsteadily. He held the case to his chest and swayed in the darkness as though cradling a restless infant. Then he followed Dan through the dust, into the embassy basement.

  Chapter 36

  Anna tended the Countess on the couch in Dan’s office while Gottfried stared out of the shattered window at the dawn illuminating the rubble on the street. His violin case lay on the desk. Dan ran his fingers across the leather, pitted and scratched from the collapse of the building next door. From the basement came the dull sound of trowel on brick as Yardeni and Richter resealed the breech in the wall.

  Devorah dragged tiredly up the stairs. She looked about for her husband.

  “He’ll be back soon, Devorah,” Dan said. “Don’t worry about him.”

  “He took Draxler to the hospital, and you think I shouldn’t worry?” She rolled her lip with her customary disdain. “I’m going to see if there are any documents that didn’t burn.” She left in the direction of the garden.

  Dan smiled. At least the embassy hadn’t burned. That was something to be grateful for. The bombs hadn’t been incendiaries that light up their targets and start a firestorm across an entire city.

  He heard heavy footsteps running down the street. Shmulik lumbered to the front of the embassy, out of breath. He saw Dan’s face in the window and shook his head, grimly. Dan met him at the door of his office.

  “It’s starting,” Shmulik said.

  Dan didn’t have to ask what “it” was. He had known it would come. “Deportations?”

  “The Nazis are rounding up Jews. On my way back from St. Hedwig I saw some people being loaded into trucks, just round the corner.”

  “Draxler?”

  “The hospital says your friend’s going to be just fine.”

  Dan didn’t bother to react to the sarcasm. “The roundup— how many people?”

  “I asked the driver. He told me they’d picked up a lot of people in Friedrichshain already. He reckoned they’d have a few thousand before Berlin wakes up to go to work. They’re trucking them to the Anhalter Station.”

  “We need to find out how many people.”

  Shmulik fixed a look of pain and disgust on Dan. “You’re getting more and more like them. Like Eichmann and his Nazi bureaucrats. What does it matter how many people are being taken away?”

  “Some of them might have made applications for emigration to Israel. We could be able to stop it that way. To go and pull them out of there.”

  The Countess whimpered. “I’m ashamed. Ashamed to be a German.”

  Anna stroked the exhausted woman’s face. “You need to stay calm now, Hannah. Please, relax. You’ve had a big shock.”

  “How can I relax when my people are doing such things?”

  Shmulik glared at the Countess. Dan understood. For his Mossad chief, there was no German left untainted by this persecution of Jews. No German who could be redeemed by their professions of shame. They were all in it, just as all Jews were on the receiving end of it.

  The Countess reached out her hand toward Gottfried. “Our boy, Wili. Our boy must help.”

  “Our boy is locked away with his Führer.” Gottfried turned from the street. “Locked away from us.”

  “Then we are the ones who must take care of this.”

  “What on earth do you mean, Hannah?”

  The Countess glanced at the violin case on the desk. Though her home lay in ruins, she clearly hadn’t given up on the idea of a concert for the Führer.

  Shmulik stomped to the door. “I’m going to the Anhalter Station to see what I can do there.”

  Dan grabbed his jacket. “Very well. I’m going to Eichmann.”

  He ran out of the embassy and sprinted toward the river. How many people were being taken away? A few thousand, as the SS driver told Shmulik? There was no number that would surprise him. There was no limit to the horror he believed the Nazis capable of. He would try to find out an exact figure later. He’d send Richter and Yardeni out to canvass the communities. It wouldn’t be easy. Berlin’s Jews had never been segregated as they were elsewhere in Germany. There was no Jewish Quarter and certainly no ghetto. There were 160,000 Jews in Berlin and they lived everywhere. Soon, Dan thought, they might live nowhere.

  Exhausted from his night digging through the rubble of the Countess’s home, he lost his strength on Unter den Linden. He leapt into a cab for the last stretch. “Kurfürstenstrasse 116, quickly,” he called.

  It was 6 a.m. The cab pulled away, driving swiftly under the camouflage netting. The central East-West boulevards that Hitler had intended to use for grand parades were perfect orienting devices for British bombers, so they had been disguised. To drive along them under the green and gray nets brought the war home, even if you were on your way back from a show at the Metropol or the Kadeko.

  They passed a truck with a pair of SS men in the cab. Dan twisted around to see inside its covered rear. It was crowded with civilians. They looked
like all other Berliners, but Dan knew they were Jews. They stood, huddled, holding each other against the rocking of the vehicle as it turned south. Half of Berlin lay that way, but Dan knew the truck was headed for the Anhalter Station and the lines to the east.

  “Picking up a lot of Yids this morning,” the driver said.

  Dan cleared his throat. “Where are they going?”

  “Well, they’re aren’t off to Prora for a vacation.” The driver laughed. Prora was the Nazi beach resort on an island off the Pomeranian coast, a reward for good behavior to German workers, an incentive that made people feel the Reich valued their happiness.

  The taxi rattled through the leafy Tiergarten Park. When they reached the Siegessäule, Dan saw that the Goddess of Victory on her tall pillar had been stripped of her gold leaf. Another precaution to deprive British bombers of landmarks to orient themselves. She was painted a dull bronze. The driver rounded the monument and headed south, past the zoo.

  At the Central Office for Jewish Emigration, Dan encountered an atmosphere of joyful activity. The SS man at the front desk sent him up to Eichmann.

  He found the Sturmbannführer on the phone, at attention, his assistant, Günther, at his side. “Yes, my Obergruppenführer. Heil Hitler,” Eichmann barked into the phone, snapping his heels together and raising his arm. He hung up. So it had been Heydrich on the line.

  When he saw Dan, Eichmann checked his watch. “Good God, it’s already six. But, look, not today, Lavi. We’re very busy.”

  “What are you doing? Where are you taking these people?”

  Eichmann rolled his tongue across his teeth. He nodded for Günther to leave. The sweet-faced young SS man gave the Nazi salute and slipped past Dan into the stairway.

  “There are several factors operating in this morning’s transport,” Eichmann said. “We have worked together for some time. I shall do you the honor of explaining. This shall assist you in accommodating your work to our new priorities.”

  Dan tried to calm himself. He needed to think straight. He was in no position to make demands.

  “As the Reich expands eastward, there is a need for labor in certain new industrial ventures being prepared in the Generalgouvernement of Poland.” Eichmann reclined in his desk chair. “Jews are largely idle here in Berlin. They aren’t permitted to engage in most trades.” He picked up a sheet of paper and checked it. “Our statistics show three-quarters of Jews in Berlin are unemployed.”