The Ambassador

by Yehuda Avner

  She poked out her tongue playfully and swung the door shut.

  She might make the national team as a gymnast if she carried on like that. A six-year-old, and yet so strong. He wouldn’t have thought she’d ever become that strong three years ago. He closed his eyes. The panic he had felt on Kristallnacht came over him once more. He interlaced his fingers and gripped them tight. While the rest of the Party had been torching synagogues and roughing up Jews, he had been fretting over his little girl, feverish, her eyes rolling up into her head, her body spasming. Instead of joining his Gestapo colleagues in the roundup of Jewish intellectuals and community leaders and supposed Commies, he had rushed to the Israeli embassy and begged the ambassador’s wife to come and treat his dying daughter. You didn’t know where that would lead, did you? he told himself. So now he loved a Jew, and a married one, at that. Even better, a Jew he had found himself compelled to arrest. Well, she’d be safer in the cells, where he could look after her. The roundups were to start in earnest now. Gruppenführer Müller had given the word to all his Gestapo agents that Jewish emigration was over and evacuation was underway.

  His shirt was wrapped too tightly around him, gripping him in its sweaty cotton. His youngest boy was three now, as Traudl had been when Anna saved her. Little Martin rolled on his back in front of the fire, pretending to wrestle an invisible enemy, calling out incomprehensible words of defiance. Is that what I’ve been doing too? Draxler thought.

  If only that was all I’d done.

  He wondered what the boy would’ve looked like if Anna had been his mother, instead of the shrew in his kitchen. He could go to her cell and tell her the things he dreamed of. He shook his head. How would that look? Turning up at the torture chamber to talk about love? She’d think he meant to rape her. But no, she wouldn’t. She’d understand that he just needed to talk, to tell her who he really was.

  He took his suit jacket, leather trench coat, and fedora from the back of the sofa. As he went to the door, his wife looked out from the kitchen nook. “Sepp, where are you going?”

  “Out.”

  “The soup’s ready.”

  “I’m not hungry.”

  She cursed at him. His rage flared, then dissipated. Why was he angry at her? He stepped back into the room. She looked up resentfully from the stove.

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  She blew out her cheeks and turned away. He shrugged. She wouldn’t be the only one who’d never forgive him.

  He ran down the stairs and climbed into his Mercedes. He sped onto Schönhauser Allee and headed toward the government quarter. He cut across behind the Sophienkirche and went down Monbijoustrasse. The Israeli embassy was silent and dark. Two of his men lingered in their car outside, but Draxler knew there was no point to the stakeout. He had heard about the business with the soup, the distraction created by the hysterical Polkes woman, and he had figured it out. The Israelis were gone.

  All but one of them.

  He wove through the streets behind the Brandenburg Gate to Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse. He left his car at the curb and quickly entered the Gestapo headquarters. Wall lamps lit the high-vaulted corridors sparsely. It was like a monastery, except that the people who lived here liked to flagellate other people, rather than themselves.

  He went down to the cells. The Kriminalsekretär at the top of the corridor gave him a puzzled look. Draxler wondered if his concern for Anna showed on his face. Certainly it wouldn’t be an expression this man would expect to see there.

  Pull yourself together, he told himself. You’ll give yourself away.

  He removed his fedora and swiped his sweating forehead with the cuff of his trench coat. “I need to see a prisoner. Anna Lavi. I was the one who brought her in.”

  The guard went to his desk. “The American woman?”

  “That’s her. Has she been interrogated since I left her?”

  “Of course not. You instructed that this was not to happen.” He ran his finger down a register. “She’s in forty-six.”

  Draxler walked down the steps and along the corridor. The light was low. The only sound was a quiet chorus of whimpering. No one was getting the treatments just now. His chest throbbed. Despite the Kriminalsekretär’s assurance, he feared that someone might have come on shift overnight and decided that the American Jew needed to spend some time with her head under water, or hanging upside down, naked. He had done it himself often enough. It worked quicker on men. Women were there to be savored. Jesus, Draxler, you bastard.

  He found the door to cell forty-six open. The wooden bench that was all prisoners had for a bed was empty. The floor was mopped clean. Anna Lavi was gone. A pulse of desperation blasted through him.

  “Herr Kriminalinspektor?” The Kriminalsekretär’s voice came down the corridor.

  Draxler rushed toward him. “Where the fuck is she? What’ve you done with her?”

  The officer waved a thin sheet of paper. “This was put through while I was on a break.”

  “What the hell is it?” Draxler grabbed the flimsy page.

  “It’s an order from the Reich Main Security Office. A transit paper.”

  Draxler scanned the sheet. Transit to where? He couldn’t make sense of the handwriting. Panic distorted his vision. Generalgouvernement, he read. Poland, Anna had been shipped to Poland. “Where has she gone? To one of the ghettoes?”

  “All the Jews were cleared out of here. She was sent too.”

  Draxler stuffed the paper into his pocket so that the guard wouldn’t see his hand shake.

  “Please, Herr Kriminalinspektor, I need to keep that copy for the file. We started a new file recently for all deportations to Auschwitz.”

  Draxler ignored the man. He ran along the corridor.

  Chapter 65

  Southern Poland

  Fourteen hours after Dan had touched down in the Messerschmitt at Tempelhof, the BMW crossed the snow-covered Silesian plain, Brückner at the wheel. Dan fingered Eichmann’s SS identity card. He was cold in the SS man’s uniform. The car was draughty. He felt, over and over, the desperation of the driver as he killed him, as if his own body would always be in a death struggle with the soul of the slain private. Of course it would be. If it were otherwise, he would be no better than the Death’s Head guards he set himself now to outwit.

  They skirted along the northern border of Heydrich’s fiefdom, the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, and around Breslau. Three hundred and fifty miles into their journey, they turned south at Kattowitz for the final hour’s drive to Auschwitz.

  Dan looked up at the night sky. It was almost midnight. The bombers would come soon.

  “I should be the one to go in,” Brückner said. “It’s too dangerous for you. If they find out who you are—”

  “They won’t.”

  “How can you be sure?”

  “They’ll do as they’re told.” He smiled. “You seem to forget that you aren’t talking to the Israeli ambassador anymore. I’m an Obersturmbannführer of the SS.”

  “But what if one of them met Eichmann on his reconnaissance visit? They’ll know you’re not him.”

  “I’ll scream in his face until he backs down.”

  Brückner laughed with resignation. “Yes, well, I have to admit that will probably work.”

  “I’ve had a couple of years to observe how Nazis behave. I’m sure it’ll work.”

  They were quiet as the road pushed through silent villages, sand dunes, mists, and wetlands. They sensed the approach of something darker than the night around them. They crossed the rail tracks that Eichmann had designated as the necessary infrastructure along which he could activate Auschwitz’s murder machine. Dan read off the plans Shmulik had received from the resistance. “Go right.”

  The rail lines headed south to Prague and Vienna. The road stopped at Birkenau.

  Brückner gazed at the perimeter wire, twelve feet high, and the SS watch towers. Hunched low in the darkness, the camp huts stood, rank after rank. “You’re sure thi
s is the one we want?”

  “Straight on through the village, we’d get to the workshops. North of that, IG Farben has its factory for the slave laborers.”

  “But this one?”

  “The extermination camp.”

  Brückner slowed as they came within sight of the gate. “ Imagine a place that no one comes out of. It’s awful.”

  Dan clapped his hand on the captain’s epaulette. “I’m coming out. So’s my wife.”

  They pulled up at the main gate. The SS guard stamped a salute. “Heil Hitler,” he bellowed.

  The Wehrmacht didn’t respond to that salute. It was one of the few ways in which the army manifested some independence. Instead, Brückner raised his hand to his brow in the traditional military salute.

  “Heil Hitler.” Dan called so loudly that Brückner’s fingers jumped against the brim of his cap and almost knocked it off.

  “I need to locate a prisoner,” Dan barked.

  “Yes, Herr Obersturmbannführer.”

  Dan handed his identity papers through the window. The guard read them. When he saw that the man was from the Reich Security Head Office in Berlin, he looked almost as sick as the Death’s Head on his cap. He dashed to the guard hut. Thirty seconds later he was back, handing the card to Dan.

  “The Untersturmführer will be here soon to assist the Herr Obersturmbannführer. Please go through the gate and wait for him on the left. That’s the women’s camp.”

  Brückner brought the staff car to a halt beside a pile of luggage. The names of the owners were chalked on each case. Irene, Karin, Margarete. As if they were coming back to pick them up later. The contents of the cases spilled out onto the frozen dirt. A group of women, skeletal, shaven-headed, dressed in thin smocks, were combing through the linens and the shoes and the toiletries, sorting them and depositing them in piles. The women shivered, moving in silence. A bored SS guard rubbed his face and watched them as though they were vermin scampering for scraps of garbage in an alley.

  Brückner groaned and covered his mouth. Dan clenched his fists in Eichmann’s leather gloves. The scent of the perfume on the clothing drifted into the car. It bore an undertone of decay and filth. That, Dan thought, must be those poor women themselves.

  Ahead of the car, the road followed a single rail line through the camp. There were a dozen rows of huts on each side. Beyond the group of women sorting clothing, the camp was dark and silent, as though the inmates were practicing for the death that would soon claim them.

  The sound of footsteps called Dan back to his mission. An NCO and a young SS officer with a big ledger under his arm marched out from between the rows of huts in the men’s camp. Dan got out of the car with Brückner. Again, he bellowed the salute to Hitler, wondering how it sounded to the quivering women as they emptied the suitcases. It scared him to hear the growl in his throat, his voice made somehow animal in pronouncing these three syllables.

  “You have an American woman here. Anna Lavi. She must have arrived within the last few days,” he said.

  “We can check, Herr Obersturmbannführer.” The officer swallowed. The arrival of a senior Berlin man intimidated him, too.

  “Do so. Find her and bring her to me.”

  The younger man hesitated. Dan saw him considering whether to ask why the woman was wanted.

  “Do it now. I must take her directly to Obergruppenführer Heydrich.”

  The two SS men almost crapped themselves at that name. The officer flipped through the ledger with a trembling hand. He pointed out an entry to the other man. Together they jogged into the darkness.

  “We must hope she doesn’t run toward you,” Brückner whispered.

  “I’d scare my own mother in this uniform. Anna will be confused and that will give her pause. It’ll be long enough for me to take control of the situation.”

  They waited. A guard shouted at the women around the suitcases and marched them off to their hut. A low hum sounded through the night sky. The SS guard dogs started barking.

  “The bombers are coming,” Dan said. “How close are they?”

  Brückner tuned in to the noise. “Five minutes away. Maybe a little more.”

  There were shouts from one of the huts. A woman shrieked. Along the row of shacks he saw the young officer. A woman tumbled out of the hut and fell at his feet. The other SS man emerged behind her.

  The officer looked down at the woman and pulled his leg back, ready to kick. He glanced toward Dan and set his foot on the ground, deciding against any punishment. He helped the fallen woman to her feet stiffly, as though he were picking up a soiled rag. He shoved her at the junior soldier and marched to the main track. The soldier and the woman came behind.

  “This is the American woman, Herr Obersturmbannführer,” the officer bellowed.

  Anna stumbled across the cold dirt in bare feet. She wore a long, striped smock and covered her head with a thin blanket, like a shawl. Her eyes were wide with terror.

  Dan put a single fist on his hip. He stepped forward and barked an order at the SS man. “In the car with her, right away.”

  She gaped at the man in the SS uniform who bore the face of her husband. The guard pulled her forward. She dropped to her knees. He hauled her along the ground.

  The young officer frowned at the sky. “What’s that noise?”

  Dan snapped his heels. “Heil Hitler.”

  Brückner was already starting up the car. Dan climbed into the passenger seat. Anna cowered on the backseat.

  “Where are you taking me?” she whimpered.

  Brückner spun the car around, jolting over the rail tracks at the apex of his turn.

  “Is that you, Herr Hauptmann Brückner?” she said.

  The two men stared ahead, ignoring the woman on the backseat.

  The SS guards pulled the gate open and the car rolled through. The sound of the bombers overhead was very loud now. Brückner turned onto the road and accelerated.

  “We have to get away from here,” he said.

  Dan twisted in his seat. He took off the Death’s Head cap. “Anna, it’s me. Sweetheart, it’s going to be okay.”

  Anna’s jaw trembled. She sprang forward, toward him, and wept as he held her. The movement drew the shawl back from her head. It was shaved. He pressed his cheek to the stubble of her beautiful hair.

  “It’s going to be okay, my love.” He held her close again as the detonations of the first bombs sounded.

  Brückner drove south quickly. The flashes of the explosions came from a half mile away to the east. “That’s not right,” he murmured.

  Dan broke the embrace with Anna. “What’s wrong?” He looked up at the bombers, dark wide silhouettes against the night sky. “That’s the IG Farben plant. They’re bombing the wrong place.”

  “Maybe your friends Churchill and Roosevelt decided the factory was a military target after all. But this place—” Brückner jerked his thumb over his shoulder toward the extermination camp. “This place isn’t.”

  Dan glared at the explosions and the gathering flames. “Turn around.”

  “Are you crazy?”

  “Go back.”

  Brückner swung into a three-point turn. “What’re you going to do?”

  “Pull over here.” Dan put his cap back on. He jumped from the car and wrenched open the trunk. He unsnapped the clasps on the box of emergency equipment welded to the chassis and opened it. He took out a pair of signal flares and stuffed them into his tunic.

  He leapt back in the car, shouting for Brückner to speed up. They were back at the gate of the death camp within two minutes. “Stop here, across the road from the entrance. I don’t want them to see Anna.”

  As Brückner pulled to a halt, a big Mercedes reached the gate. The guards opened the barricade and let it through. It drove slowly into the dark.

  Dan got out. He slammed the door shut and leaned in through the open window. “Take her to Budapest, Brückner.”

  “Without you? What’re you going to do?”
/>   “I won’t leave you,” Anna cried. “Danny, please. I can’t go without you.”

  “Anna, you have to be quiet.” Dan glanced at the frightened guards across the road. The bombs drowned out the sound of his wife’s grief. “I will see you again, my love.” He touched her face and jogged toward the gate.

  Brückner put the car into gear and took off fast.

  Dan waved for the guards to open the gate. “Move, damn it. Move.”

  The SS men shoved the gate back once more. “What’s happening, Herr Obersturmbannführer?”

  “The Allies are bombing. They’ll try for the gas chambers. Where are they?”

  “On the far perimeter.”

  “I’m going to check on them now. There may be saboteurs preparing to guide the bombers in. Remain at your posts. Allow no one into the camp. No one, you hear me? Call the watch towers. I want all spotlights switched off immediately. That’s how the bombers know where to target us.”

  Dan sprinted along the side of the rail tracks. The Mercedes was pulled up by the huts where Anna had been housed. The young SS officer he had dealt with was halfway along the row. His head was bowed. He stood before a man in a leather trench coat and a fedora who gesticulated broadly and impatiently.

  The man slapped the SS officer in the face and marched back toward his car. He looked up at the sound of Dan’s feet. Dan drew his pistol as he met his gaze.

  “What the hell?” Draxler said. “Where is she?”

  “She’s safe from all of this.” He lifted the gun and fired.

  The young SS officer ducked. Draxler moved forward, toward Dan.

  Dan stumbled away to the dark at the edge of the men’s camp, cutting along the rail track toward the gas chambers. The Gestapo man had come for his wife. He had rescued her just in time. His breath came hard. Someone was running behind him. He didn’t turn. It couldn’t be Draxler, the tread was too light.

  The SS officer. He was young, fit, coming to stop him.

  “Halt,” the officer bellowed. “Halt now.”

  The footsteps slowed. Dan looked over his shoulder. The officer had the pistol out of his holster.