Fricke conceded, Pankewicz administered his vitamins, and Konigsberg was shot at dawn.
***
Mende failed to arrive at my place the next evening, as agreed. Relieved as I was to be spared more of his vengeful letters, I couldn’t help but worry. Any unexpected change in routine was alarming, but coming so soon after I’d stood up for Manni Konigsberg, Mende’s no-show felt fatal.
He didn’t show up at Jozefinska the next morning, either. For the second time in three months, I was left sitting opposite an empty desk. To paraphrase Oscar Wilde, losing one partner may be regarded as a misfortune; losing both looks careless
Not that any of Mende’s colleagues were concerned by his absence. In terms of productivity, he was no great loss. After stewing in cold sweat for as long as I could tolerate, I followed Rottenführer Ritschak out to the courtyard and aksed if he knew what had happened to my colleague.
‘He’s with the Hauptscharführer.’
I raised my eyes to the balcony. ‘In his office?’
‘No.’ Ritschak awarded me a conspiratorial leer for persistence. ‘They’ve gone to Lublin. Classified meeting. You’ll be hearing about it in due course.’
One day later, I was sitting opposite the same empty desk.
Neither man had returned from Lublin.
I tried to construe this as a positive. If the worst had happened, and they’d found out about the Gendarme’s translator, and somehow made the connection with Harry Mohnke’s broken down train, Kunde would have ordered my immediate detention. He wouldn’t stay the night and saunter back a day later.
Although, of course, from his perspective, the situation was more complicated. My transfer to the Ghetto had been personally authorised by family friend, SS and Polizeiführer Julian Scherer. Kunde couldn’t act unilaterally. Too many sensitive conversations had to take place before I could be punished.
Twenty-four hours’ worth, perhaps.
I was visited that afternoon by an unemployed accountant called Daniel Dryzin, who claimed to have information about a troublesome folk-singer.
Dryzin was sallow, stocky and short, with a touch of deformity to his thick chest and bow legs. When I invited him to pull up Mende’s seat, he was as tall sitting down as he was standing up.
‘A folk-singer and a writer,’ Dryzin continued. ‘His name’s Mordecai Gebirtig. His family moved into the District in March. Since then, he’s been collecting, composing and performing songs illegally.’
‘Is it illegal to sing?’
‘His stuff, yes. See for yourself.’
He removed a piece of yellowing paper titled ‘Undzer Shtetl Brent! 1936, Pryztyk’.
‘Something about Our Town,’ I said. ‘I don’t speak Yiddish. Translate.’
‘Our Town is Burning,’ Dryzin said. ‘I’ll read the last verse. It's burning, brothers ! Our town is burning! And our salvation hands on you alone. If our town is dear to you, grab the buckets, douse the fire! Show that you know how! Don't stand there, brothers, looking on, with futile, folded arms. Don't stand there, brothers, douse the fire! Our poor village burns!’
‘It’s a description of a fire,’ I said, swallowing my bile. ‘I don’t see the problem.’
‘It was a riot, sir, not a fire. A mob of Poles destroyed Jewish houses and beat them. A shoe-maker had his head split open with his own axe.’
‘And how did this song come into your possession?’
‘Gerbirtig gave his papers to the daughter of a friend of his, for safe-keeping. My daughter knows his daughter. She was able to take this, as proof.’
‘Proof of what?’
‘He sings the song at gatherings, secret ones. To incite others. They go wild, clammering and yelling. It’s a rallying call. Don’t stand there with futile, folded arms. It’s a metaphor, sir, for standing up and taking action against you, against your men.’
‘Thank-you for explaining the literary technique, Professor Dryzin. Does it incite you?’
‘Me?’
‘Yes, when you read it just now. Are you not a Jew? Doesn’t it fill you with a righteous fury?’
Dryzin looked appalled. ‘No. The only thing it incited me to do was to report it.’
‘For which we are all grateful. I shall keep the song.’
‘Of course, sir. That’s why I brought it.’
I was about to dismiss him when a car blasted its horn outside to clear the road. Through the front door, I saw a black limousine pull up to the kerb. Karl Mende squeezed out the driver’s door, walked around the bumper and opened the rear one for Wilhelm Kunde. At the front desk, Klaus Rother saluted as they entered the building. Kunde disappeared immediately up the stairs on the left and Mende walked through the the maze of work-stations towards us. He stopped behind me, put his hands on my shoulders and dug his thumbs into the muscle.
‘Don’t think I’m ungrateful, Harry, but I’m going to have arrest you for bringing the Reich into disrepute.’
His grip tightened.
‘Get the fuck out of that seat.’
I stood up, pushing into Mende, who hadn’t moved.
‘Not you, funny man,’ he said. ‘I go away for a day and you turn this place into a kibbutz. You, midget: move.’
Dryzin hopped down. I started to sway from side to side while Mende took out a handkerchief and unfolded it over his seat cover.
‘What’s he got for us then? Better be good.’ Mende glanced at Dryzin and I, then scowled at the yellowed sheet of paper on my blotter. He groaned. ‘A poem?’
‘It’s a song,’ Dryzin said. ‘A protest song, performed right here in the District.’
‘That’s better.’ Mende crossed his boots on the desk and laced his fingers behind his head. ‘Keep going.’
Dryzin told the story of Mordecai Gebirtig while I concentrated on slowing down my heartbeat with a series of long, subtle breaths. When he was finished, I asked Mende what he thought we should do.
‘Sounds like a job for your pharmacist, Harry.’
‘I’m not sure I follow.’
‘He’s so fond of giving injections, he can rustle up a drop or two of diphtheria.’
‘The vaccine?’
‘Christ, no. The bacteria.’
Mende clutched a fist to his throat, splayed the fingers in a sudden spasm then moaned as they wilted like dead leaves. I had no idea what this was supposed to mean.
‘Paralyze this singer’s vocal chords,’ he explained. ‘That should teach him a lesson. No sense in over-kill, is there?’ He grinned at Dryzin. ‘Now whistle on out of here, Shorty. Station’s closing early.’
The last few Jews scurried towards the exit. Klaus Rother closed and locked the front door behind them, then signalled to an unseen presence at the back of the office. At his gesture, one of the younger officers came in from the courtyard carrying a bucket of iced champagne, followed by two more, while a fourth ferried a crate of glasses. They set up bar on Rother’s counter and began de-corking bottles and arranging flutes on silver trays as if drilled in the kitchens of the Hotel Adlon.
Wilhelm Kunde descended the stairs while they poured. He had visited the barber, perhaps as recently as this morning. Hair chiselled into a neat wedge, pushed up at the front and shorn at the sides over those ears, wide as shovels. His freshly-shaved cheeks glistened like apples. Champagne flutes were distributed to our desks as Kunde stood at the counter with his back to us, rehearsing his thoughts.
I wondered what they’d heard at Lublin. Could the Allies have surrendered? It seemed impossible, given the current precarious balance of power. RAF Bomber Command had only just carried out the first 1,000 bomber raid, against Mende’s beloved city of cologne. The US naval task force were at that moment heading for midway in preparation for the expected Japanese attack. But on the Eastern Front, the Battle of Kharkov had ended in German victory, with over 230,000 Soviets killed. One thing was certain: the war would end, on a day much like today, and chances were nobody would see it coming.
Glass filled
, I joined the rest of the office in standing to receive Kunde’s speech.
‘As many of you know, I have expressed before my deepest conviction in God. Not the Christian God, but a belief in fate, in the ancient one as I call him – that is the old Germanic word: Wralda.’
Shoulders slumped at this, ever so slightly. Wralda. Was that why we had gathered, to pay respect to some kind of pagan deity? Would Kunde be off to the mountains tonight, gallivanting around his bonfire? Mende too? I wasn’t surprised.
‘The essence of these megalomaniacs, these Christians who talk of men ruling this world, must stop and be put back in its proper proportion. Man is nothing special at all. He is but a speck on this earth. If a big thunderstorm comes, he can do nothing. He cannot even predict it. He has no idea about the inner workings of a fly, however grotesque. Or how a flower blossoms. They are miracles. Man must once again look with deep reverence into this world. Then he will acquire the right sense of proportion about what is above, and how we are woven into this cycle.
‘The time has finally arrived when we will have to deal with this Christianity once and for all. The time has come when we must settle accounts with this greatest of plagues, which has weakened us in every conflict. Mighty as our ancestors were, they lacked the resolve for such decisive action. That burden has now passed down to us, in this eternal chain and sequence.’
The crevice between Kunde’s eyes deepened like a scar.
‘Yesterday, I attended a briefing by Odilo Globocnik, SS and Polizeiführer of Lublin District. We have at long last received instruction as to the the ways and means of liquidating the Polish Jewry, henceforth to be known as Aktion Reinhard, in honour of its instigator, the Schutzstaffel-Obergruppenführer.
‘This process will begin in three days time. Let us drink to mark this most momentous of days in the history of the Germanic Reich.’ He raised his champagne flute, lower lip jutting like a stanchion. ‘To Wralda.’
***
It was during these preparations that I first learned the name of the Hauptsturmführer of a tough Sonderkommando unit who’d done ‘sterling work’ for racial purity in the Lublin area and was relocating to Cracow to ensure that June 1st ran smoothly. Mende and I were selected to accompany Wilhelm Kunde on a tour of the Ghetto when our guest arrived. His name? Amon Goethee.
I dropped my coffee when I heard that fateful triptych, claiming to have burnt my lips.
For four hours last November, I’d sat with the man’s thigh next to mine on the front seat of a sled. Thank God we’d travelled at night, over fields lit by nothing but moonlight. I recalled Goethe was suffering from a cricked neck. He couldn’t turn round and spent the whole journey staring at the haunches of the pack he drove. But I’ll never forget his face in side profile, its rugged aristocracy: the thuggish brow and hooked nose, the long slit of nostril sharp as a papercut, the wedge of grimaced mouth and weak chin. When we reached the synagogue, I’d made myself scarce and kept to the shadows. On the ride home, Goethe and the Belorussian celebrated by getting drunk.
It was possible he wouldn’t remember the night at all.
But that didn’t stop me ransacking Erich Mohnke’s bedroom cupboards for a Zeiss Opticians case, and rubbing hemp oil under my nose and shaving eight times in two days.
I inspected my work in the bathroom that morning. The results were satisfying; the round spectacles and faint moustache just enough to alter my appearance. There was even a touch of Heinrich Himmler in the reflection, a popular look that season amongst pro-Nazis of a certain age. Every bar in the city had at least one face like mine staring into his dregs.
43
The day started peacefully at Jozefinska. Several times I caught myself day-dreaming that the last six months of relative stability in the Ghetto might last until the Allies won the war. But then a memo crossed my desk stamped with the word ‘Reinhard’, or I overheard mention of the Lublin troop deployment headed our way.
To put my new appearance to the test, I asked to borrow Mende’s newspaper. He tossed it over. After a few seconds of turning pages and squinting, I said, ‘I’m sure the damned print gets smaller every week.’
My colleague gave a non-committal grunt. I could have told him I was a Jewish spy and it would have got the same response.
I grandly swept an arm into my jacket pocket, came out with the Zeiss case and hooked the metal arms over my ears as deliberately as a palsied grandfather.
Mende didn’t even look up.
I’d been keeping one eye on the front door, but in the end the devil slipped in through the courtyard. Seated opposite me, it was Mende who noticed first, and raised a welcoming arm.
The field-grey shoulder boards of an army Hauptmann swept past my chair, trailing aftershave and cigarette smoke. I watched him receive Mende’s effusive handshake. It was as if Wralda himself had descended from the mountaintop.
To my eyes, Amon Goethe looked more like an overgrown school-boy than a God in the daylight. Softly-spoken, with gentle eyes, cherubic cheeks and a touch of the sniffles, I found it hard to reconcile his face with the mask of the butcher who’d presided over the slaughter of an entire village. He’d filled out considerably in the past six months, developing a paunch and fleshy jowls. But it was the face I kept coming back to. Large, malleable, fleshy, ears fat as lemons.
‘And this is Mohnke,’ Mende said. ‘The department couldn’t function without him. I’m not sure any of us could.’
Goethe turned his transparent blue eyes my way. He sniffed, dabbing a tissue to his nose. ‘You used to the the professor?’
‘That’s correct, sir.’
‘I don’t know how you controlled yourself, all those fine young beauties hanging on your every word.’ He gave a shy smile. ‘Did you? Control yourself?’
‘I’m German,’ I said. ‘Self-control is my birth-right. Although I might have given myself the one or two nights off.’
‘All part of a girl’s education, I’m sure. This place must be a hell of a come down after campus life.’
‘I’ve seen worse, sir. I was in Southern Russia last year.’
‘Good God, my sympathies. Everything’s relative, eh Professor? The crazy-haired Jewish physicist was right about that at least. Russia’s not going anywhere unfortunately, but we’ll have this place in order before long, I give you my word. Now where can I find your Hauptsturmführer?’
Ten minutes later, the four of us were ready to begin the tour. Since it was a glorious summer afternoon, Kunde had arranged for his open-topped sports car to be waiting outside instead of the usual limousine. The smaller sized vehicle meant the chauffeur wouldn’t be accompanying us.
‘Mende, you drive,’ Kunde said, allocating himself the passenger seat.
I realised this left the two of us in the back. Goethe took the nearside seat, so as to better converse with his host, diagonally rather than to the back of Kunde’s head. Which left me on Goethe’s right. It couldn’t have worked out any worse. Within minutes of Goethe’s arrival in Cracow, I was recreating the exact conditions of our sled ride.
Fortunately, Goethe was too amused by life in the slums to pay me much attention. We drove the length of Jozefinska, Kunde pointing over his shoulder to the Jewish Hospital and House of Orphans as if ticking off the sights of Rome. At the far end of the street we turned left and doubled back on Limanowskiego, the other main thoroughfare that ran the Ghetto’s length. At the gate we followed the southern wall round on Rekawka Street, and finally took the ‘scenic’ route back, criss-crossing each of the sixteen blocks along the way.
Before we reached the stationhouse, Goethe asked me to describe the work of the Department of Civil Affairs. I explained the role of Smyche Spira’s Jewish Police, his team of informants, and recapped some of our successes.
‘Superb work,’ Goethe said. ‘And you will of course be instrumental in the build-up to tomorrow.’
‘We can’t wait to get started, sir.’
‘In order to ensure the Aktion passes s
moothly, the Jews must be led to believe that a large-scale resettlement programme is commencing. You can lay the foundations when we get back. Call in your informants and spread the word.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘The Jews will be so desperate to get out of here, they’ll believe anything.’
‘Where exactly are they going?’
The kindness passed from Goethe’s face in an instant and those eyes ran cold. Sensing the change in ambience, Kunde twisted round in his seat. The look he gave me made it quite clear that I had not been brought along to question a superior officer’s orders.
‘That is to say,’ I explained. ‘To minimise panic, it might help if I could tell the Jews where they were being resettled to... But, as you said, they’ll think anywhere is better than this place.’
Goethe closed his eyes, settled his chin on his fist and inhaled deeply.
‘You’re right,’ he said eventually. ‘Let’s tell them the truth. They’re going to larger cities in the East, where there’s more space and better conditions.’
‘Very good, sir. I apologise if I was disrespectful.’
Goethe waved a dismissive hand. ‘I need to be challenged from time to time, it’s good for my constitution. It’s funny, you remind me of somebody, Professor. I just can’t think who.’
‘You may have seen a photograph of Erich Mohnke in the papers last year,’ Kunde said. ‘Assassinated in Warsaw. Harry’s the younger brother.’
‘That’s it,’ Goethe crowed. ‘Blown up by the JFO. Take your cap off.’
I complied, running a hand through my hair.
‘Christ, you’re the spitting image. You even wear the same glasses.’
I Am Juden Page 40