[2019] Citizen 865

by Debbie Cenziper

  The other historians specialized in certain countries or Nazi units. White became OSI’s generalist. During long days, she pored over thousands of documents from the archives in Europe, Israel, and the United States for names of Nazi perpetrators. She compiled data on each suspect, then worked to match the details with people in the United States.

  “High-stakes history,” she told Blackmore, who had proposed marriage on an old picnic bench in the backyard of the rented townhouse they shared. White said yes, accepting a piece of hard candy in lieu of an engagement ring since they were saving to buy a house.

  “In my next life,” she told her future husband, “I am going to be high maintenance.”

  One summer afternoon in 1990, Peter Black stopped by White’s office and peered over a stack of file folders. As chief historian at OSI, Black was overseeing dozens of active investigations and would soon travel with two other historians to Czechoslovakia, where four decades of Communist rule had ended.

  For the first time, Czech authorities were opening the archives to Western historians, and Black needed another set of eyes on the research trip. White, more than any other historian at OSI, was familiar with the kinds of records most likely to reveal names of potential defendants.

  White paused, flattered by the offer to join Black and the others. She knew that the Nazi regime had stashed thousands of war records in Prague because Soviet and Allied troops did not bomb the city or even approach it until the last days of the war. White’s mind raced, thinking about what they might uncover.

  Spending even a week away from home, however, seemed almost impossible to manage. Her husband had been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, just as her father had predicted, and already Bill was having trouble walking. Their two-year-old daughter was not yet in preschool, and White knew from early-morning symptoms that she was pregnant with their second child.

  She sized up the massive pile of records on her desk and sighed. Under George H. W. Bush, officials in the Justice Department were studying whether OSI historians could be replaced with contractors offering the lowest bid for their services. No one knew how much time the OSI historians had left, whether they would be forced to leave their work unfinished.

  That, White decided, would be a tragedy, to the victims of the war and to the record of history, which clearly had not yet been settled.

  She looked at Black. She would go to Prague.

  IT WAS NEARING midnight, and Peter Black could scarcely make out the rambling rows of shops and houses hidden in the darkness. The night was quiet—no people, no car engines—and the silence was an eerie sort, a restless city struggling to shake the past, moving toward something that wasn’t yet clear.

  Black was jet-lagged and hungry. After landing in Frankfurt, Black, Barry White, and two other OSI historians had driven due east across Germany in a temperamental stick shift that had wheezed and grunted for five hundred dusty kilometers. They crossed the border into Czechoslovakia and eased into Prague to search for the rental apartment they would share during their visit.

  The humming of the car engine on a quiet residential street drew people from their homes, still in their nightclothes, and Black wondered what they were thinking as they watched the curious German car with four Americans creep down streets and back alleys.

  They found the rental apartment in a massive, Soviet-style complex that stretched across blocks on the outskirts of the city. Black expected to find it empty, but the owner of the apartment had waited for them, and she promptly advised her American visitors that she had no great love for gypsies or a Czech breakfast that did not include beer and fried potatoes. She wagged a finger at White, the youngest in the group, clearly distressed that White was not married to one of her traveling companions.

  Black fell asleep and woke before dawn. He found the landlady in the kitchen, fussing over a sizzling pan of fried pork cutlets. The four historians would start the visit at the city’s military archives, searching for anything related to the Gestapo, concentration camps, or the murderous units of the SS and the eastern European collaborators that they had deployed.

  Black had waited years for this day. Unlike Poland’s government, the Communist government in Czechoslovakia had always summarily rejected research requests from OSI. For the first time, Black would learn the secrets that the Third Reich had hidden in Czechoslovakia at war’s end, tucked inside caches of Nazi rosters and records.

  Besides White, he had come with Mike MacQueen, who as a younger man thought he would become an engineer until he grew more interested in nationalist movements, and Pat Treanor, who had conducted research in more than a dozen languages and spent months helping OSI investigate the wartime activities of Austrian president Kurt Waldheim. Both men had lived in Communist countries, where toilet paper was scarce but liquor was plentiful. In Bulgaria, Treanor had come to enjoy Zubrowka, a dry, herb-flavored vodka from Poland.

  After breakfast, the historians set out on an ancient city bus. Black glanced at White, who was three months pregnant and had barely touched her food. Her husband was already walking with a cane, and Black knew that in a matter of years White would become the family’s sole breadwinner.

  Black sat back in his seat. In the shadows that come just before morning, he could see the city’s castles and cathedrals set along the banks of the Vltava River, remarkably untouched by the air raids during World War II, the 1948 Communist coup, or the Soviet invasion of 1968 that had restored hard-line Communism to Czechoslovakia.

  The bus pulled up in front of the military archives, a grand building just outside Prague’s business district with a sprawling courtyard behind the entryway. The historians were shown to a file room. Ten hours passed quickly as they looked over hundreds of documents, randomly stuffed inside boxes and folders.

  “Fleisch,” MacQueen remarked late in the day, using the German word for “meat.” It was a curse more than a comment. The best attribute of a good researcher, he reminded the weary group, was a fleshy rear end for long stretches of sitting.

  They came away with a few scraps of information, including SS investigative reports of concentration camp shootings, with black-and-white sketches of prisoners who had been shot trying to escape over a barbed-wire fence. The emotion that had gone into the drawings was striking, and Treanor would wonder for years afterward whether the mystery artist had felt compassion for the dead.

  At dusk, the historians went to look for dinner and stumbled into a tiny restaurant near their apartment.

  “Don’t order the carp,” MacQueen told White, who had never traveled in a Communist country. “It’s a bottom feeder, and you don’t want to know on what.”

  But carp was the only thing on the menu, and they returned to the apartment hungry, briefcases slung over their shoulders. The first day of research had been relatively disappointing, and Black wanted to sleep and set out fresh in the morning.

  “You Americans work too much,” their Russian landlady chortled.

  At daybreak the next morning, the four historians split up to look over records at different archives. Treanor and MacQueen would return to the military archives and soon leave for the archives of Bratislava, on the north side of the Danube River. Black and White would travel to the Bohemian city of Litomerice, to a memorial museum in Terezin, northeast of Prague, and then to Brno, the capital of Moravia.

  On their last day in Prague, Black arranged for a visit to the archive of the Federal Ministry of the Interior. Outside the apartment block, a government sedan pulled up, and Black and White ducked inside. Black glanced silently at the Czech security agents in the front seat, pistols latched to their hips. The sedan crept out of the city, easing past the boxy, Soviet-era cars that crowded the narrow streets.

  At the ministry, the sedan pulled into a cobblestone alleyway hidden behind a wooden gate. The agents motioned toward a metal-cage elevator. It stopped at the entryway of a vast, wood-paneled hall, where a half dozen government officers were waiting, standing stiffly on an Oriental carp
et that stretched across the expanse of the room.

  Black stepped forward, nodded at the Czech interpreter, and said in English, “Thank you for meeting with us. We are historians from the US Department of Justice, responsible for investigating people who were involved in Nazi crimes and now live in the United States. I am Dr. Black and this is Dr. White.”

  The officers smirked at the names, and Black had no doubt that they suspected he and White were spies. He nearly chuckled himself, imagining what the frowning officers were thinking. The CIA has no imagination.

  They were shown to a drafty stone room in the basement that smelled of dust and old cardboard. Black sat at a long table, White at another. Fighting morning sickness, she went to search for a bathroom and found one in a nearby airshaft, with a toilet that flushed with a chain.

  They were given a long list of the records managed by the ministry, random documents about German employees in France and people who had worked for the puppet state of Slovakia, for the SS, and for police units in Poland. At the end of each hour, White made her way to the bathroom to vomit.

  Several hours passed. Suddenly, White stood up. In a faded yellow folder, she had recognized a name. Streibel.

  She carried the folder to Black. The documents were thin, faded, and sheared at the edges.

  “What do you make of this?” White asked, standing over Black’s shoulder.

  He studied the first page, scanning dozens of names and Erkennungsmarken, German military identification numbers. The second page had dozens more. There was a date at the top, 1945, and the name that had caught White’s attention: SS Battalion Streibel. Karl Streibel had been the commandant of the Trawniki training camp.

  Black read the headings across the top of the page:

  Dienstgrad

  Name

  Geb.am

  Soldbuch Nr.

  Rank

  Name

  Born on

  Identification number

  Black was looking at a roster with the names of men who had served in the battalion as it retreated across Poland during the summer and fall of 1944, waging operations against partisan resistance movements and guarding Polish civilians forced to dig anti-tank trenches. Each man had a rank, an identification number, and an assignment; some documents listed birth dates, most between 1915 and 1925. The names were Ukrainian, ethnic German, Lithuanian, Russian, Polish.

  Black studied the pages carefully. He stopped short when he saw the name of Liudas Kairys, identification number 1628. Black’s mind raced, dates and events flashing in quick succession. Kairys had received a promotion at Trawniki; on the roster, he was listed as an Oberwachmann, a guard corporal. The date—November 1944—jumped off the page.

  Kairys had served at the Treblinka labor camp until July 1944, when, as Soviet troops approached, the SS and their Trawniki-trained guard detachment had shot as many as seven hundred Jewish prisoners before dismantling the camp.

  Clearly, Black thought, Kairys had earned his promotion.

  Black turned to another page. There was Vladas Zajanckauskas, the man from Massachusetts, listed on the document as a supply officer rather than a server in the Trawniki canteen, with the mundane duties that he had once described to OSI attorneys. Another lie.

  Black flipped back to the front of the file, to the page with Streibel’s signature. He drew in his breath. Jakob Reimer, identification number 865, was listed with the rank of SS-Oberzugwachmann, a top sergeant—the highest rank available to a Trawniki-trained man.

  “Look, look,” he said to White. “Here’s Reimer.”

  White nodded. “These are all Trawniki men.”

  Black looked at the dates again. He knew from the personnel file sent by the Soviets that Reimer had been at Trawniki from 1941 to 1944. But the roster that White discovered put Reimer in SS service until 1945, which meant that he had served for nearly the entire duration of the war. No wonder the SS had granted Reimer German citizenship.

  Black knew of no other guard who had served at the camp longer than Reimer and who had risen from a recruit to the highest-ranking position for a non-German SS auxiliary. Reimer was not a lowly paymaster. He had been an essential part of Trawniki, there from start to finish, among the most trusted recruits in the operation.

  Slowly, Black counted all the names on the roster. He sat back in his chair and looked at White.

  There were more than seven hundred men.

  Chapter Eleven

  Code for Murder

  Washington, D.C., and Hamburg, Germany

  1991–1992

  Aaron Black was named after baseball great Hank Aaron, so it wasn’t entirely surprising to his parents when his fingers crisscrossed a letter board designed for autistic children and spelled out:

  I WANT TO COLLECT CARDS

  The letter board was a new tool, a form of facilitated communication that gave Peter and Mary Black another way to communicate with their nine-year-old son, who had spoken only a few words when he was a year old—bath, bye, dad—and then stopped talking altogether.

  “What’s your favorite color?” So many crayons. They would finally know.

  GREEN

  “What do you want to eat today?”

  MCDONALD’S

  “Why are you sad?” Aaron’s fingers moved right, left, back again.

  YOU ARE GOING TO DIE ON THE PLANE

  His father was struck by the answer. “No, no. It’s not going to happen.”

  Peter Black was once again preparing to leave for Germany, where in 1976 SS commander Karl Streibel, the fair-skinned, pot-bellied commandant of the Trawniki training camp, had been acquitted after a trial on charges of accessory to murder. Black wanted to review the records in the Hamburg state prosecutor’s office, which had supervised the case against Streibel.

  After reopening the Reimer investigation and the breakthrough in the archives of Prague, Black was searching for clarity. It was one of the ways he measured success as a historian, whether he could piece together the chronology of horrific events, put history into context.

  Now, Black studied his worried son. For years after Aaron was diagnosed with developmental delays and then autism, he couldn’t speak to his parents or his younger sister, Laura. But he had found his own way to communicate, taking his mother’s or father’s hand and pointing it toward the refrigerator when he was hungry or to the door in his bedroom when he wanted to relax there.

  Once, when Black was working late, Aaron rummaged in his father’s closet, walked downstairs, and presented his mother with a pair of Black’s trousers. Aaron had determined that it was time for his father to come home. Mary understood in the way that all parents know their children, through an organic combination of instinct and practice, reinforced by dozens of books about childhood development.

  With the letter board, Aaron, fiercely protective, could finally let his parents know that he worried when they traveled on planes. Black took research trips two or three times a year, flying to Germany, Poland, Israel, Russia, Austria. For the sake of his family, he decided he would no longer leave home for more than a week.

  BLACK FLEW TO Hamburg alone, made his way to the prosecutor’s office, and introduced himself to the lawyer who had helped oversee the case against Karl Streibel fifteen years earlier.

  In May 1945, a British armored cavalry unit had found Odilo Globocnik, the SS and police leader of Lublin, hiding in his home city of Klagenfurt in southern Austria along with several of his cronies. As the British closed in, Globocnik bit down on a cyanide capsule and died instantly. He was buried next to an outer wall of a local churchyard.

  Streibel, his man at Trawniki, got away.

  History books contained few details about the Trawniki commandant, but Black knew that Streibel had been born at the turn of the century in southern Poland, in idyllic Upper Silesia, with its forests and mountain lakes. The son of a carpenter who had fought in the First World War, Streibel joined the Nazi Party and then the SS in 1933, within days of the appointment of
Hitler as Reich Chancellor.

  Streibel worked for Globocnik in Lublin as early as 1939, mustering and training ethnic German auxiliaries. In October 1941, Streibel took command of the Trawniki training camp, handpicked for the job by Globocnik.

  By some accounts, Streibel had been a regular drunk, prowling the grounds of Trawniki in black leather boots and a long wool coat. In the summer of 1944, as the Soviet offensive swept through eastern Poland to the Vistula River, Streibel abandoned the camp with a battalion of men. They withdrew to the west and later to Dresden, Germany, where they assisted with cleanup of the city after Allied firebombing.

  In the final days of April 1945, near the German border with Western Bohemia, Streibel’s men burned their papers and scattered, blending into the chaos of a newly defeated Germany.

  Twenty-five years after the war, West German prosecutors brought Streibel to trial. The criminal justice system in West Germany had largely gone soft on Nazi offenders by the 1970s, the public no longer particularly interested in another prosecution from a war that most everyone wanted to forget. At high-profile trials in Ulm, Hamburg, Frankfurt, and Düsseldorf, a series of SS men were convicted, but most received lenient sentences and some were even acquitted.

  Streibel was indicted in 1970. He denied knowing the true purpose of the Trawniki camp, and German judges six years later decided that he couldn’t be held responsible for the grisly role of his men in the mass murder of Poland’s Jews. After his acquittal, Streibel found work as a storekeeper in the library of a Lutheran church in Hamburg.

  How could he not have known? To Black, it had been a dubious court ruling. A leader of a training camp with no knowledge of the camp’s mission?

  In 1943, Globocnik had successfully pushed to promote Streibel, writing that Streibel had commanded the Trawniki camp “with the greatest discretion and understanding for the special leadership needs of this unit. These units have proved themselves in the best way in many anti-partisan missions, but especially in the framework of the Jewish resettlement.”