The Ambassador

by Yehuda Avner

  The spotlights on the guard towers cut out just as a new fusillade rumbled over the IG Farben plant and a wall of flame rose beyond the main road. The synthetic rubbers and chemicals of the factory burned bright, silhouetting the officer as he took aim.

  Dan kept running, weaving to make a tougher target. But he was tired, from the flying, the driving, the tension of his mission to Cairo. Tired after three years of accumulated Nazi horrors.

  A shot, and another shot. He heard them, but his legs continued to move and he felt no pain.

  He turned. The SS officer was on his knees, wounded. The flames of the Allied bombing licked at the sky. Draxler stepped up quickly to the injured man. He put his pistol to the officer’s head and pulled the trigger.

  The fire that rose behind Draxler was like a Satanic halo. The Gestapo man’s face registered a profound loss, like a dying man with no more will to fight. He turned and walked away.

  Dan ran the last thirty yards to the building that housed the gas chamber and the crematorium. It was so small he could hardly credit the capacity for death Eichmann ascribed to it in his report at Wannsee. It was about forty paces long, a single story, with windows only at the ends and two tall chimneys rising from the shallow pitched roof.

  Behind him, the SS gate guards rushed down the tracks. Draxler opened fire on them.

  Dan bounded onto the hood of a truck parked beside the gas chamber. He remembered what Eichmann had said. The destruction of the bodies was the problem. Killing Jews was simple enough, but to dispose of their remains without forcing them to dig a pit and having German troops execute them was difficult. The purpose of Auschwitz was to separate the killers from the victims, so that they could persist in killing for longer, and thus kill more.

  He climbed onto the top of the truck and from there onto the roof of the gas chamber. The Jews entered from this end. They died, panicking and scrambling for safety. Then they were shoveled into the ovens at the other end of the building and rose to whatever heaven awaited them as smoke from the chimneys.

  The SS guards cried out as Draxler’s bullets brought them down.

  Dan pulled the cap off a flare and turned it to bring the rough striking surface to the ignition button on the end. He scraped the cap over the flare as if he were lighting a match.

  A dense orange smoke and a bright red light fired up in his hand. He lifted the flare above his head. With the searchlights extinguished, the light in the flare illuminated the smoke so that it was a pillar of fire above him. In the blackout, it would be pinpoint clear to the bombers above.

  He pulled the cap from the second flare with his teeth and lit it on the end of the other one. The two beacons climbed above him. He waved them and stumbled to the center of the gas chamber’s roof.

  “Come on, come on,” he shouted. “Over here.”

  Another bomber dropped its load on the IG Farben plant. The explosions were like a distant breath over Dan’s face.

  “Over here, damn it. Please.”

  He detected a slight change in the pitch of the droning engines as some of the planes peeled away. He stared into the sky directly above him. The fire from the IG plant illuminated the wings of a Flying Fortress. On the underside, in white paint, the bold angular shape of the Star of David. It was the squadron Ben-Gurion had finagled out of Roosevelt in Cairo, the symbol the Old Man wanted, to show that with the founding of Israel, Jews were now responsible for their own security. The belly of the bomber opened and Dan heard a whistling sound descend toward him. His face melted into a smile as though it were his wife’s arms coming to enfold him.

  The gas chamber exploded around him. He tumbled to his knees. The flares––he held them up again. He had to mark the target.

  The bombs carved a line down the west of the camp. Then another stock of high explosives roared through the night and Dan felt himself ascending on its power.

  He came down on the trembling earth, battered by the rubble of the gas chamber. The flare lay in the mud in front of him. He tried to reach it, but his arm was gone. His vision blurred and the cold reached up out of the ground and shivered through to his core. He squinted to focus his eyes. He looked about him. Auschwitz was on fire.

  Epilogue

  Jerusalem, 1948

  The Germans bought two apartments in Talbiyeh, the upmarket neighborhood where the Dutch, Chileans, and Venezuelans already had their diplomatic missions. One was to be for the embassy, the second the ambassador’s residence. The other occupants of the building, most of whom happened to have fled Germany or lost relatives to the Nazis in Poland and Russia, were initially outraged to find that they were to share an entrance with the first post-war representative of their former oppressor. But the ambassador went door to door on the very day of his arrival to introduce himself, and his fine High German won over the yekkes, who were astonished to discover that, only five years after Hitler put a gun to his head in his besieged bunker in Berlin, Germany had sent as its representative a man whose father had been a Jew.

  The ambassador left his residence on the third floor shortly after 9 a.m. on a bright April day. He wore white tie and a tailcoat. He opened the second-floor door to the embassy and called to his consular officer. “Come on, Michael. My penguin costume makes me enough of a spectacle on these streets without my having to run because you’ve made me late.”

  The young man scuttled into the stairway, pulling on his suit jacket. He pointed at the battered violin case the ambassador carried. “I hope no one thinks there’s a machine gun in there.”

  The ambassador caught him by the elbow and they set off together through the stumpy apartment buildings toward the home of the Israeli president. The streets were decked with hundreds of blue and white Israeli flags. The Jewish State would be marking its tenth anniversary the following day. There would be a celebratory concert in the presence of the president. The ambassador had hurried along his appointment to his new post specifically so that he might arrive in time to attend.

  As they walked, the sun was most effective in reminding the two Germans that, despite the trees planted by the European Jews who had settled this neighborhood in the Thirties, their posting was in a desert.

  “Can you imagine?” the ambassador mused.

  The young man strode swiftly to keep up. “Imagine what, Herr Ambassador?”

  “All these people in all these houses. All Jews. And our country was ready to murder them. Every one of them. It’s as if we were to come through this city and simply slaughter everybody we found, and then destroy another city, and another and another.”

  A boy and girl little older than toddlers ran laughing from the garden of an apartment house, waving tiny cloth flags of blue and white. They halted at the strange sight of the ambassador’s formal wear. Most Israelis wore short-sleeved shirts, open at the neck. Many sported short pants, too.

  The ambassador tipped his top hat. “Boker tov, yeladim.” Good morning, children. The kids stared after him in silence.

  “They’re lucky,” the young diplomat said. “To have survived here, rather than—”

  The ambassador interrupted. “They’d have been luckier if they were members of a people that was never persecuted.”

  “Of course, I meant only that they weren’t among the ones we…we…”

  “If you’re going to work as a German diplomat here, Michael, you’d better get used to saying it.”

  “The ones we exterminated.”

  They marched up Lovers of Zion Street, toward the ridge where the president’s mansion was nearing completion.

  “I suppose it would’ve been a lot worse if the extermination camps hadn’t been destroyed by the Allied bombers,” the young man said.

  “And the Israeli Air Force squadron,” the ambassador said. “If it hadn’t been for Israel’s involvement in the North Africa campaign, the war would’ve most likely lasted until the middle of forty-five.”

  “Who would’ve won that war?” The young man laughed.

  The amb
assador shook his head, smiling. Then he was stern. “We lost the war the moment we murdered the first Jew.”

  They walked on, pondering the memory of horrors that seemed so out of place under the sunshine of the Levant.

  “So many millions,” the ambassador said. “Indeed, it would have been millions more, had it not been for the man we’re about to meet.” He gestured toward the low dome and the plain walls of the presidential residence.

  The country’s first figurehead, Chaim Weizmann, had lived in his own home, in the city of Rehovot, without an official residence. The man who recently took over from him had moved into the residential wing of the new structure while the reception rooms were still under construction. At the curb, a truck was delivering sacks of cement for the building’s completion. It was parked alongside another vehicle loaded with folding chairs for the following day’s ceremony.

  A small detachment of security, sheltered by a canvas awning, guarded the entrance of the president’s residence. They checked the ambassador and his assistant, and then directed them across the muddy yard.

  The two Germans passed a marquee that was being assembled for the anniversary concert the next day. A dozen tanned young men labored, shirtless, on the structure, laying boards over the dirt, hammering the scaffold for the stage.

  At the door of the residence, a woman of about forty with clear olive skin and prematurely white hair waited. She noticed the ambassador’s surprise and touched her simple haircut. “It grew back this color.” She laughed. “Doesn’t it make me look stately?”

  “It is fitting for the president’s wife,” the ambassador said.

  She hugged him and drew him down the hall. A half dozen secretaries and aides bustled around the desks lining the walls.

  “We live in these rooms to the left,” she said. “The offices aren’t finished yet, so the staff beavers away out here. As does His Honor the President.”

  At the far end of the hall, a man lifted himself from his chair. The short sleeve on the left of his shirt dangled, empty, and he crossed the floor with a stiff leg, the knee damaged permanently and clearly still painful. A boy of about four came with him.

  “Let’s do the formalities,” the president said. “I don’t care for them, but you’re a German, so we probably should.”

  The ambassador held out a thin envelope. “Allow me to present the letters of credence by which Chancellor Konrad Adenauer has appointed me to be Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of the Federal Republic of Germany to the State of Israel.”

  The Israeli president took the envelope. He embraced the ambassador. “My dear Brückner. My dear, dear fellow.”

  “Dan, it’s good to see you,” Brückner said. “This must be your boy?”

  Dan Lavi gripped the four-year-old’s shoulder. “Shmulik, say hello to our old friend, Herr Brückner.”

  The boy blushed and struggled away behind his father’s legs. “Don’t want to.”

  “He has his own mind.” Brückner laughed. “Just like his namesake.”

  Anna Lavi picked up her son. The boy brushed his mother’s white hair back from her eyes. “Mommy, why are you crying?” he asked.

  Anna kissed the child and touched her husband’s scarred cheek. “Danny, did you see what our friend brought?”

  Dan noticed the violin case. He looked at Brückner, questioning. “Can that be—?”

  “Wili’s Stradivarius. For the anniversary concert tomorrow.” Brückner handed over the violin. Dan took it as if it were a new baby.

  “Arvid,” he called out. “Come and see.”

  The big form of Arvid Polkes filled the doorway of the president’s suite of private rooms. He rushed over to Brückner and shook his hand. Bertha and the Polkes children came through the same door, the girls almost adults now, wearing the army’s rough olive drab. Polkes took the violin case and opened its clasp. With his smile still showing the gaps in his teeth where the Gestapo had beaten him, he turned to show the Stradivarius to his wife and children.

  It seemed to Brückner that the souls of his parents—the Jew who had once played this violin and the Prussian Countess who had loved him—emerged together from the battered old case. Dan and Anna smiled at him. He knew they felt the same presence.

  “You told me once how Wili—how my father played “Hatikva” in Israel,” Brückner said.

  “Our national anthem. ‘The Hope.’ At our Declaration of Independence.”

  “Arvid, would you oblige me?”

  “I can play. But I’m a stage manager, not a soloist.” Polkes smiled.

  “It won’t be a solo.” Brückner gestured toward his assistant.

  Polkes brought the violin to his shoulder. He scraped the bow over the strings, tuning it from the A on the third string, then closed his eyes to play the opening notes of the anthem.

  Brückner’s assistant spread his chest and, in a pure tenor that brought the shirtless workmen in from the garden marquee, the young German sang out the Hebrew words of hope and freedom and life.

  The End

  Historical Note

  Our fictional story ends at the historical moment of Israel’s real foundation. Even if Israel—and Dan Lavi—had existed before World War II, it wouldn’t have stopped the Holocaust in its entirety, such was the scope of the madness and the murder. In this book, we’ve served the memory of that time in two ways. First, by adhering as closely as possible to real people, to real places and events. Second, we’ve honored the true purpose of history, which is to learn from past times so that the future might be better.

  The idea underlying the book—that decisive actions in international affairs can make a difference—is an important one with great resonance for a world still engaged in dreadful conflicts and with the potential for even greater ones. Dan’s actions alter the course of history. Fictional history is easier to modify than real history. But both are susceptible to change, nonetheless.

  Sometimes we think of the Holocaust as playing out over the entire period of World War II. In fact, Eichmann and other top Nazis favored expelling the Jews to the island of Madagascar in the Indian Ocean until that plan was deemed unworkable in 1940. Later, the wastes of Siberia were to be the dumping ground for the Jews, but that idea was abandoned when the German advance into the Soviet Union foundered in late 1941. Only then did the plan for extermination truly come to the fore. In January 1942, the conference at Wannsee plotted the Final Solution—our chapters on that event are closely based on the actual minutes of the meeting, which were noted down by Eichmann. Could immediate, decisive action at that time, of the kind taken by our fictional Israel and our fictional Dan Lavi, have changed the reality of the mass murder that soon unfolded? We leave the conclusion to you, but we will bring one statistic to your attention: When Heydrich convened the Wannsee conference, eighty percent of the Jews who would eventually be murdered in the Holocaust were still alive; only sixteen months later, eighty percent of them were already dead.

  Up to the time of the Wannsee Conference, our narrative adheres quite closely to genuine historical timing. We sped up key events in the North African campaign and moved the Cairo Conference forward by a year to give our Ben-Gurion the opportunity to meet Roosevelt and Churchill there.

  Though our premise rests on history taking a different turn, we used a great many actual historical sources to build our narrative, our characters, and their dialogue. The speech of some of our “real” characters includes actual quotes. For example, much of what our Hitler says constitutes the exact words he used in his speeches or in private conversations later recorded by memoirists. The moment when Heydrich tells Eichmann that Hitler has ordered the extermination of the Jews is drawn directly from Eichmann’s interrogation after his kidnapping to Israel, as are some of Eichmann’s other comments. The conversation between Eichmann and Auschwitz commandant Höss was compiled from Eichmann’s own recollections and from comments Höss made during his war crimes trial.

  Even where we deviated from quote
d speech, it remained important to us that every historical character should respond in accordance with their real actions. Eichmann’s staff did indeed refer to him as “Maestro” because of his passion for the violin. Heydrich was a classically trained musician, the son of an opera composer who also ran a music conservatory in his hometown of Halle. Historical veracity was important to us not just in building the Nazi characters, but also in providing a true representation of the disputes in the Zionist movement over Ben-Gurion’s dealings with Berlin and his agreement to the partition of Palestine. After all, one of the authors actually worked under Ben-Gurion; this book aims to be true to what the man stood for, as well as to create a genuine portrayal of the horrors that he stood against.

  As to the fates of our main non-fictional characters:

  Reinhard Heydrich became Deputy Protector of Bohemia and Moravia. Four months after Wannsee, Czech and Slovak agents were dropped into Czechoslovakia by the British to assassinate him. He died of his wounds soon after the attack. In the reprisals that followed at Hitler’s order, 1,300 Czechs were murdered, while 13,000 were arrested, deported, and imprisoned.

  The real Countess Hannah von Bredow was a member of the Solf Circle, a group of anti-Nazi intellectuals, most of whom were killed by the Gestapo or died in concentration camps. The Countess escaped and died in Hamburg in 1971.

  Friedrich Kritzinger tried to resign from his post at the Chancellery in protest of the conclusions of the Wannsee conference. As a witness at the Nuremburg Tribunals, he declared himself ashamed of the Nazi atrocities. He died at the age of fifty-seven, two years after the end of the war.

  Sir Arthur Grenfell Wauchope was replaced as British high commissioner to Palestine in 1938 because of London’s dissatisfaction with his handling of the Arab Revolt. He served as colonel of his regiment during World War II and spent his last years in India, where he died in 1947 at the age of seventy-three.

  Transferred away from Auschwitz in 1943, Rudolf Höss returned to the camp in 1944 to supervise an operation named after him, in which 430,000 Hungarian Jews were exterminated in fiftysix days. A year after the war, his wife gave him up to British troops. He was tried in Poland and executed in 1947 by slow strangulation on a short-drop gallows.